David Deutsch

“an unproblematic state is a state without creative thought. Its other name is death.”

— David Deutsch

The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at…

— David Deutsch

To me quantum computation is a new and deeper and better way to understand the laws of physics, and hence understanding physical…

— David Deutsch

“Amending the ‘data’, or rejecting some as erroneous, is a frequent concomitant of scientific discovery, and the crucial ‘data’ cannot even be…

— David Deutsch

Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilisation or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes…

— David Deutsch

Time travel may be achieved one day, or it may not. But if it is, it should not require any fundamental change…

— David Deutsch

Every problem that is interesting is also soluble.

— David Deutsch

The quantum theory of parallel universes is not the problem, it is the solution. It is not some troublesome, optional interpretation emerging…

— David Deutsch

“The scientific revolution was part of a wider intellectual revolution, the Enlightenment, which also brought progress in other fields, especially moral and…

— David Deutsch

Quantum computation is... a distinctively new way of harnessing nature... It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be…

— David Deutsch

I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching…

— David Deutsch

“To interpret dots in the sky as white-hot, million-kilometre spheres, one must first have thought of the idea of such spheres. And…

— David Deutsch

Science is objective. And in my view we cannot take any experimental results seriously except in the light of good explanations of…

— David Deutsch

It is possible to build a virtual-reality generator whose repertoire includes every possible environment.

— David Deutsch

Is the human race a universal constructor?

— David Deutsch

Where we have good, testable explanations, they then have to be tested, and we drop the ones that fail the tests.

— David Deutsch

No precautions, and no precautionary principle, can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee. We need a stance of problem-fixing, not…

— David Deutsch

Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow.

— David Deutsch

Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense.

— David Deutsch

The most important application of quantum computing in the future is likely to be a computer simulation of quantum systems, because that's…

— David Deutsch

I don't think it would be a good idea for scientists to have more political power. Scientists as a group are more…

— David Deutsch

I chop and change between what is called 'work' and what is called 'recreation.' There are no discontinuities in my day. I…

— David Deutsch

If you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it.

— David Deutsch

Despite the unrivaled empirical success of quantum theory, the very suggestion that it may be literally true as a description of nature…

— David Deutsch

The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or…

— David Deutsch