253 | David Deutsch on Science, Complexity, and Explanation

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2023

⏱️ 102 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

David Deutsch is one of the most creative scientific thinkers working today, who has as a goal to understand and explain the natural world as best we can. He was a pioneer in quantum computing, and has long been an advocate of the Everett interpretation of quantum theory. He is also the inventor of constructor theory, a new way of conceptualizing physics and science more broadly. But he also has a strong interest in philosophy and epistemology, championing a Popperian explanation-based approach over a rival Bayesian epistemology. We talk about all of these things and more, including his recent work on the Popper-Miller theorem, which specifies limitations on inductive approaches to knowledge and probability.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/10/16/253-david-deutsch-on-science-complexity-and-explanation/

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David Deutsch received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Oxford. He is currently a visiting professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at Oxford. He is a pioneer in quantum computation as well as initiating constructor theory. His books include The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity. Among his awards including the Dirac Prize, the Dirac Medal, the Edge of Computation Science Prize, the Isaac Newton Medal, the Breakthrough Physics Prize, and a Royal Society Fellowship.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. We've talked
0:04.7	about quantum mechanics a lot on the podcast. You may have heard that I am a fan of the
0:10.0	Everettian, many worlds formulation of quantum mechanics, but we have a special treat in
0:15.1	that we have a guest who actually met Hugh Everett and was influenced by him and has
0:20.2	gone on to be a major proponent of the Everettian version of quantum mechanics. That would
0:25.6	of course be David Deutsch. And despite that, despite the fact that David is very well-known
0:32.3	in his work in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, he was basically, if you have to give
0:38.8	credit to one person for pioneering the idea of quantum computers, it would have to be David
0:45.8	Deutsch. There's other people who made very significant contributions there, but David was one
0:51.2	of the first to really define what it means to do a quantum computation, to write down an algorithm
0:57.0	that was faster than a classical algorithm, to really think about how entanglement can help you
1:02.4	encrypt things using quantum mechanics and so on. It's been super duper influential. He's been
1:09.0	awarded various prizes for this, the Breakthrough Prize, the Fellowship of the Royal Society, and so
1:14.0	forth. But that's not all. In fact, in this podcast, we're not even going to talk about quantum
1:19.5	mechanics that much. We're going to be talking about various things that David has been thinking about
1:24.8	that grow out of arguably his combination of an interest in the fundamental laws of physics, but also
1:32.6	in epistemology, how we learn things about the world. You know, we've heard, you heard me talk about
1:39.3	quantum mechanics and Everett. You've also maybe heard me talk about Bayesian reasoning and Bayesian
1:45.0	inference and epistemology. And so unlike quantum mechanics where David and I are very much on the same
1:51.6	team, here we are not. And so that's why one is to talk about. He's been thinking a lot about,
1:58.4	I guess what you might call poparian epistemology after Karl Popper, the idea that we think about
2:05.0	possible worlds and we divide them into the ones that are compatible with the data and then not,
	...

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