The Fabric of Reality


The Fabric of Reality is a 1997 book by physicist David Deutsch. His follow-up book, The Beginning of Infinity, was published in 2011.

Overview

The book expands on 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.

The four strands

  1. Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, "The first and most important of the four strands".
  2. Karl Popper's epistemology, especially its anti-inductivism and its requiring a realist interpretation of scientific theories, and its emphasis on taking seriously those bold conjectures that resist being falsified.
  3. Alan Turing's theory of computation, especially as developed in Deutsch's "Turing principle", where Turing's Universal Turing machine is replaced by Deutsch's universal quantum computer.
  4. Richard Dawkins' refinement of Darwinian evolutionary theory and the modern evolutionary synthesis, especially the ideas of replicator and meme as they integrate with Popperian problem-solving.

    Deutsch's TOE

His theory of everything is 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. But the sheer adventure of thinking not just out of the envelope but right out of the Newtonian universe is exhilarating."