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.
True science discovers God in an ever-increasing degree β as though God were waiting behind every door opened by science.
Chimpanzees, more than any other living creature, have helped us to understand that there is no sharp line between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. It's a very blurry line, and it's getting more blurry all the time.
The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
Indeed, the whole human species is endangered, by nuclear weapons or by other means of wholesale destruction which further advances in science are likely to produce.
If what the science tells us about climate change is correct, then unabated it will result in catastrophic consequences for our world.
In evolution, as in all areas of science, our knowledge is incomplete. But the entire success of the scientific enterprise has depended on an insistence that these gaps be filled by natural explanations, logically derived from confirmable evidence. Because "intelligent design" theories are based on supernatural explanations, they can have nothing to do with science.
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