David Deutsch

Biography

British physicist, born in Haifa in 1953, educated at Cambridge and Oxford, where he is Professor of Physics, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a member of the Centre for Quantum Computation. In 1985 he proposed the quantum Turing machine, laying the theoretical foundation of quantum computation. The Fabric of Reality (1997) set out his worldview across four strands—evolution, quantum physics, knowledge and computation—while The Beginning of Infinity (2011) argues that the creation of good explanations is an objectively infinite process in the universe and that optimism is a theorem about the nature of knowledge creation rather than a wish. He received the Dirac Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics in 1998 and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2022.