Everything about David Deutsch totally explained
David Deutsch FRS (born
1953 in
Haifa,
Israel) is a
physicist at the
University of Oxford. He is a non-stipendiary Visiting Professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the Centre for Quantum Computation,
Clarendon Laboratory. He pioneered the field of
quantum computers, and is a proponent of the
many-worlds interpretation of
quantum mechanics.
The Fabric of Reality
In his 1997 book
The Fabric of Reality, this interpretation, or what he calls the
multiverse hypothesis, is one strand of a four-strand theory of everything. The four strands are:
- Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, "the first and most important of the four strands".
- Karl Popper's epistemology, especially its anti-inductivism and its requiring a realist (non-instrumental) interpretation of scientific theories, and its emphasis on taking seriously those bold conjectures that resist falsification.
- Alan Turing's theory of computation especially as developed in Deutsch's "Turing principle", Turing's universal Turing machine being replaced by Deutsch's universal quantum computer. ("The theory of computation is now the quantum theory of computation.")
- Richard Dawkins's refinement of Darwinian evolutionary theory and the modern evolutionary synthesis, especially the ideas of replicator and meme as they integrate with Popperian problem-solving (the epistemological strand).
His theory of everything is (weakly)
emergentist rather than
reductive. It aims not at the reduction of everything to particle physics, but rather mutual support among multiverse, computational,
epistemological, and evolutionary principles.
Views
Politically, Deutsch is known to be sympathetic to
libertarianism, and was a founder, along with
Sarah Fitz-Claridge and Kolya Wolf, of the
Taking Children Seriously movement. He is also an
atheist.
Awards
He was awarded the
Dirac Prize of the
Institute of Physics in
1998, and the
Edge of Computation Science Prize in
2005. The
Fabric of Reality was shortlisted for the
Rhone-Poulenc science book award in 1998.
Popular publications
The Fabric of Reality, ISBN 0-14-014690-3
Forthcoming publications
Deutsch is currently working on a book entitled The Beginning of Infinity, which he hopes to finish in early 2009.
Further Information
Get more info on 'David Deutsch'.
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