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
The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests.
Interpretation
Most theories are dismissed due to poor explanations rather than failure in experiments.
David Deutsch highlights an important aspect of scientific inquiry, emphasizing that the rejection of theories is primarily due to their inability to provide satisfactory explanations of the phenomena they aim to describe. This implies that a good theoretical framework is crucial for the acceptance of scientific ideas, beyond just empirical validation through experiments.
In practice
In a scientific debate, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of clear explanations in theory validation.
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.
Yes, genes are important for understanding our behavior. Incredibly important - after all, they code for every protein pertinent to brain function, endocrinology, etc., etc. But the regulation of genes is often more interesting than the genes themselves, and it's the environment that regulates genes.
It was strange, in a way, because there were no ideas involved in the laser that weren't already known by somebody 25 years before lasers were discovered. The ideas were all there; just, nobody put it together.
[Decoding the human genome sequence] is the most significant undertaking that we have mounted so far in an organized way in all of science. I believe that reading our blueprints, cataloguing our own instruction book, will be judged by history as more significant than even splitting the atom or going to the moon.
Remember that [scientific thought] is the guide of action; that the truth which it arrives at is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself.
Human exploration is something that's been going on for thousands of years, and the models that worked 500 years ago are likely to work again today.
I am persuaded that this method [for calculating the volume of a sphere] will be of no little service to mathematics. For I foresee that once it is understood and established, it will be used to discover other theorems which have not yet occurred to me, by other mathematicians, now living or yet unborn.
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