The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch

I'm even a little more so now than I was, because I see that the idea of it is catching on. I'm also “optimistic” in the sense that I expect progress to continue in the future. I think the arguments against that proposition are as untenable as ever. Horgan: Are you as optimistic now as when you wrote The Beginning of Infinity?ĭeutsch: What I call optimism is the proposition that all evils are due to a lack of knowledge, and that knowledge is attainable by the methods of reason and science. See also my follow-up post, Is Science Infinite? –John Horgan In fact, more often than not I found myself agreeing with him-or at the very least hoping that he's right.” My optimism has been flagging lately, so I reached out to Deutsch for a booster shot, and we had the following email exchange. “Deutsch makes the case for infinite progress with such passion, imagination and quirky brilliance,” I wrote, “that I couldn't help but enjoy his company. Although he critiques my book The End of Science, I found Deutsch’s radical optimism so fascinating that I gave Infinity a rave review. Those hypothetical universes branching off ours every instant really exist! In 2011 I immersed myself in Deutsch’s worldview when The Wall Street Journal asked me to review his book The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World, which argues that the quest for knowledge is infinite.

He is renowned for his ideas about quantum computation, and for his insistence that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true. Physicist David Deutsch is such a thinker. They knock me so askew that the world gets weird again, in a good way. Some thinkers, even if I disagree with them, jolt me in a way I like.

The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch