8.2 /10 1 Votes8.2
Country United States Publication date August 1, 1997 Pages 390 pp. Originally published 1997 Genre Non-fiction | 4.1/5 Goodreads Language English Media type Print, e-book ISBN 978-0713990614 Publisher Viking Press | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Fabric of Reality is a 1997 book by the physicist David Deutsch. The text was initially published on August 1, 1997 by Viking Adult and Deutsch wrote a followup book entitled The Beginning of Infinity, which was published in 2011.
Contents
Overview
The book 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
- 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).
Deutsch's TOE
His theory of everything is (weakly) emergentist rather than reductive. It aims not at the reduction of everything to particle physics, but rather at mutual support among multiverse, computational, epistemological, and evolutionary principles.
Reception
Critical reception has been generally positive. The New York Times wrote a mixed review for The Fabric of Reality, writing that it "is full of refreshingly oblique, provocative insights. But I came away from it with only the mushiest sense of how the strands in Deutsch's tapestry hang together." The Guardian was more favorable in their review, stating "This is a deep and ambitious book and there were plenty of moments when I was out of my depth (the Platonic dialogue between Deutsch and a Crypto-inductivist left me with a pronounced sinking feeling). But the sheer adventure of thinking not just out of the envelope but right out of the Newtonian universe is exhilarating."