Quantum computation is a distinctively new way of harnessing nature. It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes.
David DeutschRead
Where we have good, testable explanations, they then have to be tested, and we drop the ones that fail the tests.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of testing explanations to ensure their validity and reliability.
David Deutsch highlights the scientific method's core principles: the necessity of having explanations that can be rigorously tested, and the willingness to discard those that do not withstand scrutiny. This reflective process is essential for advancing knowledge and understanding the world around us.
In practice
In a scientific conference, when discussing research findings, one might quote this to emphasize rigorous testing.
Quantum computation is a distinctively new way of harnessing nature. It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes.
Science is objective. And in my view we cannot take any experimental results seriously except in the light of good explanations of them.
If you canβt program it, you havenβt understood it.
Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow.
Discovering a new explanation is inherently an act of creativity.
To me quantum computation is a new and deeper and better way to understand the laws of physics, and hence understanding physical reality as a whole.
Data, I think, is one of the most powerful mechanisms for telling stories. I take a huge pile of data and I try to get it to tell stories.
We are concerned that, in a few years time, this place of discovery, with its wealth of human fossils, the like of which can be found nowhere else in the world, could be completely destroyed.
Follow the evidence wherever it leads, and question everything.
The total quantity of all the forces capable of work in the whole universe remains eternal and unchanged throughout all their changes. All change in nature amounts to this, that force can change its form and locality, without its quantity being changed. The universe possesses, once for all, a store of force which is not altered by any change of phenomena, can neither be increased nor diminished, and which maintains any change which takes place on it.
I thought that tackling aging and the mechanisms that promote life would be worth figuring out. I wanted to learn why it is that some people are healthier than others and why some people live to 110 and others only to 60 or 70.
Quantum mechanics brought an unexpected fuzziness into physics because of quantum uncertainty, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. String theory does so again because a point particle is replaced by a string, which is more spread out.
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