Science

History is the history of ideas, not of the mechanical effects of biogeography. Strategies to prevent foreseeable disasters are bound to fail eventually, and cannot even address the unforeseeable. To prepare for those, we need rapid progress in science and technology and as much wealth as possible. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Arthur C. Clarke once remarked that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'. This is true, but slightly misleading. It is stated from the point of view of a pre-scientific thinker, which is the wrong way round. The fact is that to anyone who understands what virtual reality is, even genuine magic would be indistinguishable from technology, for there is no room for magic in a comprehensible reality. Anything that seems incomprehensible is regarded by science merely as evidence that there is something we have not yet understood, be it a conjuring trick, advanced technology or a new law of physics. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implications

The whole motivation for seeking a perfectly secure foundation for mathematics was mistaken. It was a form of justificationism. Mathematics is characterized by its use of proofs in the same way that science is characterized by its use of experimental testing; in neither case is that the object of the exercise. The object of mathematics is to understand – to explain – abstract entities. Proof is primarily a means of ruling out false explanations; and sometimes it also provides mathematical truths that need to be explained. But, like all fields in which progress is possible, mathematics seeks not random truths but good explanations. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The biologist Peter Medawar described science as ‘the art of the soluble’, but the same applies to all forms of knowledge. All kinds of creative thought involve judgements about what approaches might or might not work. Gaining or losing interest in particular problems or sub-problems is part of the creative process and itself constitutes problem-solving. So whether ‘problems are soluble’ does not depend on whether any given question can be answered, or answered by a particular thinker on a particular day. But if progress ever depended on violating a law of physics, then ‘problems are soluble’ would be false. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

If it turns out that all this time we have merely been studying the programming of a cosmic planetarium, then that would merely mean that we have been studying a smaller portion of reality than we thought. So what? Such things have happened many times in the history of science, as our horizons have expanded beyond the Earth to include the solar system, our Galaxy, other galaxies, clusters of galaxies and so on, and, of course, parallel universes. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implications

I think that there is only one way to science – or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it and to live with it happily, till death do ye part – unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting, though perhaps difficult, problem children… — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Yet, over time, the conclusions that science has drawn have become ever truer to reality. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

But, in reality, scientific theories are not ‘derived’ from anything. We do not read them in nature, nor does nature write them into us. They are guesses – bold conjectures. Human minds create them by rearranging, combining, altering and adding to existing ideas with the intention of improving upon them. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

We do not begin with ‘white paper’ at birth, but with inborn expectations and intentions and an innate ability to improve upon them using thought and experience. Experience is indeed essential to science, but its role is different from that supposed by empiricism. It is not the source from which theories are derived. Its main use is to choose between theories that have already been guessed. That is what ‘learning from experience’ is. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

The quest for good explanations is, I believe, the basic regulating principle not only of science, but of the Enlightenment generally. It is the feature that distinguishes those approaches to knowledge from all others, and it implies all those other conditions for scientific progress I have discussed: It trivially implies that prediction alone is insufficient. Somewhat less trivially, it leads to the rejection of authority, because if we adopt a theory on authority, that means that we would also have accepted a range of different theories on authority. And hence it also implies the need for a tradition of criticism. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

Just as no one in 1900 could have foreseen the consequences of innovations made during the twentieth century – including whole new fields such as nuclear physics, computer science and biotechnology – so our own future will be shaped by knowledge that we do not yet have. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

As the physicist Richard Feynman said, ‘Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Observations are theory-laden. Given an experimental oddity, we have no way of predicting whether it will eventually be explained merely by correcting a minor parochial assumption or by revolutionizing entire sciences. We can know that only after we have seen it in the light of a new explanation. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The second fundamental misconception in inductivism is that scientific theories predict that ‘the future will resemble the past’, and that ‘the unseen resembles the seen’ and so on. (Or that it ‘probably’ will.) But in reality the future is unlike the past, the unseen very different from the seen. Science often predicts – and brings about – phenomena spectacularly different from anything that has been experienced before. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

To say that prediction is the purpose of a scientific theory is to confuse means with ends. It is like saying that the purpose of a spaceship is to burn fuel. In fact, burning fuel is only one of many things a spaceship has to do to accomplish its real purpose, which is to transport its payload from one point in space to another. Passing experimental tests is only one of many things a theory has to do to achieve the real purpose of science, which is to explain the world. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: Towards a Theory of Everything

Bad philosophy before the Enlightenment was typically of the because-I-say-so variety. When the Enlightenment liberated philosophy and science, they both began to make progress, and increasingly there was good philosophy. But, paradoxically, bad philosophy became worse. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Rational: Attempting to solve problems by seeking good explanations; actively pursuing error-correction by creating criticisms of both existing ideas and new proposals. The West The political, moral, economic and intellectual culture that has been growing around the Enlightenment values of science, reason and freedom. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

But then the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who was well aware of the distinction between the absolutely necessary truths of mathematics and the contingent truths of science, nevertheless concluded that Euclid’s theory of geometry was self-evidently true of nature. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Richard Feynman said, ‘Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Logical positivism [is] the bad philosophy that statements not verifiable by observation are meaningless. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

What had changed? What made science effective at understanding the physical world when all previous ways had failed? — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Testability is now generally accepted as the defining characteristic of the scientific method. Popper called it the ‘criterion of demarcation’ between science and non-science. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

So if it would be wrong for science to adopt that ‘democratic’ principle, why is it right for politics? Is it just because, as Churchill put it, ‘Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification—the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit. — Karl Popper, 1992