The Fabric of Reality

A penetrating exploration of the new physics, including time travel, quantum computers, and the multiverse from an award-winning physicist

For David Deutsch, a physicist of unusual originality, quantum theory contains our most fundamental knowledge of the physical world. Taken literally, it implies that there are many universes “parallel” to the one we see around us. This multiplicity of universes, according to Deutsch, turns out to be the key to achieving a new worldview based on four main strands:

• Quantum physics and its many-universes interpretation
• The theory of evolution (Darwin/Dawkins)
• The theory of computation (quantum computation)
• The theory of knowledge (Karl Popper), explanation and understanding

The Fabric of Reality explains and connects many topics at the leading edge of current research and thinking, such as quantum computers (which work by effectively collaborating with their counterparts in other universes), the physics of time travel, the comprehensibility of nature and the physical limits of virtual reality, the significance of human life, and the ultimate fate of the universe.

Here—for scientist and layperson alike, for philosopher, science-fiction reader, biologist, and computer expert—is a startlingly complete and rational synthesis of disciplines, and a new, optimistic message about existence.Preface
Acknowledgments
1. The Theory of Everything
2. Shadows
3. Problem-solving
4. Criteria for Reality
5. Virtual Reality
6. Universality and the Limits of Computation
7. A Conversation about Justification
8. The Significance of Life
9. Quantum Computers
10. The Nature of Mathematics
11. Time: The First Quantum Concept
12. Time Travel
13. The Four Strands
14. The Ends of the Universe
Bibliography
IndexDavid Deutsch, internationally acclaimed for his seminal publications on quantum computation, is a member of the Quantum Computation and Cryptography Research Group at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford University.