The Fabric of Reality is a book by physicist David Deutsch written in 1997. It expands upon his views of quantum mechanics and its implications for understanding reality. This interpretation, which he calls the multiverse hypothesis, is one of a four-strand Theory of Everything (TOE). The four strands are:
- Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, "The first and most important of the four strands".
- Karl Popper's epistemology, especially its anti-inductivism and its requiring a realist (non-instrumental) interpretation of scientific theories, and its emphasis on taking seriously those bold conjectures that resist falsification.
- Alan Turing's theory of computation especially as developed in Deutsch's "Turing principle", Turing's Universal Turing machine being replaced by Deutsch's universal quantum computer. ("The theory of computation is now the quantum theory of computation.")
- Richard Dawkins's refinement of Darwinian evolutionary theory and the modern evolutionary synthesis, especially the ideas of replicator and meme as they integrate with Popperian problem-solving (the epistemological strand).
His theory of everything is (weakly) emergentist rather than reductive. It aims not at the reduction of everything to particle physics, but rather mutual support among multiverse, computational, epistemological, and evolutionary principles.
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Famous quotes containing the words fabric and/or reality:
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)