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
If you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it.
Interpretation
True understanding of a concept is proven by one's ability to implement it practically.
David Deutsch's quote emphasizes that comprehension of an idea is not merely theoretical but practical as well. If one cannot translate a concept into a program, it signifies a lack of deep understanding of that concept, as real mastery enables one to apply knowledge effectively in real-world scenarios, particularly in the field of technology and programming.
In practice
In a tech seminar, to emphasize the importance of hands-on experience, one might say, 'Remember, if you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it.'
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.
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.
Where we have good, testable explanations, they then have to be tested, and we drop the ones that fail the tests.
Isolated facts and experiments have in themselves no value, however great their number may be. They only become valuable in a theoretical or practical point of view when they make us acquainted with the law of a series of uniformly recurring phenomena, or, it may be, only give a negative result showing an incompleteness in our knowledge of such a law, till then held to be perfect.
I still hear some people say that science takes the wonder out of life. Those people are utterly wrong. Science takes us to the wonder
Science fiction was one of those places, particularly during the McCarthy era, where you could write whatever you wanted because it was beneath contempt. They didn't bother censoring it.
The reality is the majority of us will not get off this planet. So the long run is, some kind of space exploration has to benefit us here on Earth.
Even Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, and Albert Einstein made serious mistakes. But the scientific enterprise arranges things so that teamwork prevails: What one of us, even the most brilliant among us, misses, another of us, even someone much less celebrated and capable, may detect and rectify.
What a deep faith in the rationality of the structure of the world and what a longing to understand even a small glimpse of the reason revealed in the world there must have been in Kepler and Newton to enable them to unravel the mechanism of the heavens in long years of lonely work!
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