Fabric of Reality Book Club
Deutsch says our body of knowledge keeps growing both deeper—better explanations—and wider—new fields, more facts, rules of thumb. He thinks depth is winning. It might be interesting to asses what that balance looks like in 2025.
Deutsch says our body of knowledge keeps growing both deeper—better explanations—and wider—new fields, more facts, rules of thumb. He thinks depth is winning. It might be interesting to assess what that balance looks like in 2025.
Consequently (they say), whether or not it was ever possible for one person to understand everything that was understood at the time, it is certainly not possible now, and it is becoming less and less possible as our knowledge grows.
If something already isn’t possible, how could it become less possible?
Isn’t possibility a binary thing? As opposed to difficulty, which exists in degrees.
Deutsch says our body of knowledge keeps growing both deeper—better explanations—and wider—new fields, more facts, rules of thumb. He thinks depth is winning. It might be interesting to asses what that balance looks like in 2025.
Deutsch says our body of knowledge keeps growing both deeper—better explanations—and wider—new fields, more facts, rules of thumb. He thinks depth is winning. It might be interesting to asses what that balance looks like in 2025.
Perhaps it’s premature, but I’d love to discuss:
why DD thinks the four strands already amount to a theory of everything
why DD presents quantum mechanisms as having already subsumed general relativity
what other (proto)strands we could envision and why they are indeed a meaningful addition to the 4 strands
Deutsch says our body of knowledge keeps growing both deeper—better explanations—and wider—new fields, more facts, rules of thumb. He thinks depth is winning. It might be interesting to asses what that balance looks like in 2025.
Can't think of how it could be otherwise. Do you have any examples of inexplicit explanations?
The important thing is to be able to make predictions about images on the astronomers’ photographic plates, frequencies of spectral lines, and so on, and it simply doesn’t matter whether we ascribe these predictions to the physical effects of gravitational fields on the motion of planets and photons [as in pre-Einsteinian physics] or to a curvature of space and time.
I’m getting conflicting results online for this quote. Some sources that quote the same passage say singular ‘effect’, others use the plural like Deutsch does.
I don’t have access to the original text, so I can’t say for sure if this is possibly a slight misquote or if different people are just quoting different editions.
The important thing is to be able to make predictions about images on the astronomers’ photographic plates, frequencies of spectral lines, and so on, and it simply doesn’t matter whether we ascribe these predictions to the physical effects of gravitational fields on the motion of planets and photons [as in pre-Einsteinian physics] or to a curvature of space and time.
I’m getting conflicting results online for this quote. Some sources that quote the same passage say singular ‘effect’, others use the plural like Deutsch does.
I don’t have access to the original text, so I can’t say for sure if this is possibly a slight misquote or if different people are just quoting different editions.
The important thing is to be able to make predictions about images on the astronomers’ photographic plates, frequencies of spectral lines, and so on, and it simply doesn’t matter whether we ascribe these predictions to the physical effects of gravitational fields on the motion of planets and photons [as in pre-Einsteinian physics] or to a curvature of space and time.
I’m getting conflicting results online for this quote. Some sources that quote the same passage say singular ‘effect’, others use the plural like Deutsch does.
I don’t have access to the original text, so I can’t say for sure if this is possibly a slight misquote or if different people are just quoting different editions.
The important thing is to be able to make predictions about images on the astronomers’ photographic plates, frequencies of spectral lines, and so on, and it simply doesn’t matter whether we ascribe these predictions to the physical effects of gravitational fields on the motion of planets and photons [as in pre-Einsteinian physics] or to a curvature of space and time.
I’m getting conflicting results online for this quote. Some sources that quote the same passage say singular ‘effect’, others use the plural like Deutsch does.
I don’t have access to the original text, so I can’t say for sure if this is possibly a slight misquote or if different people are just quoting different editions.
The important thing is to be able to make predictions about images on the astronomers’ photographic plates, frequencies of spectral lines, and so on, and it simply doesn’t matter whether we ascribe these predictions to the physical effects of gravitational fields on the motion of planets and photons [as in pre-Einsteinian physics] or to a curvature of space and time.
I’m getting conflicting results online for this quote. Some sources that quote the same passage say singular ‘effect’, others use the plural like Deutsch does.
I don’t have access to the original text, so I can’t say for sure if this is possibly a slight misquote or if different people are just quoting different editions.
We discuss David Deutsch’s first book, The Fabric of Reality.