David Deutsch [Show Notes]
Abstract
Professor David Deutsch argues that Einstein wouldn’t get funded today. Modern grant systems, anti-nepotism rules, and checkbox-driven bureaucracies systematically exclude the very kind of fundamental research that produced relativity and quantum mechanics. Firstly, he explains why “funding people, not projects” is the only viable path forward. Secondly, he reveals that quantum computing required Everettian thinking and couldn’t have emerged from collapse interpretations. He recounts his lunch with Hugh Everett, details his own failed but instructive attempt at qubit field theory, and explains why free will isn’t about overriding the laws of physics but about bringing genuinely new knowledge into existence.
Who Is Professor David Deutsch?
A Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He’s widely regarded as a founder of quantum computation, having proposed the universal quantum computer in 1985. His books The Fabric of Reality (1997) and The Beginning of Infinity (2011) develop a philosophy centered on explanatory knowledge and its growth. Alongside Chiara Marletto, he co-developed constructor theory, a framework that reformulates physics in terms of which transformations are possible versus impossible.
Deutsch’s Top 3 Theses
Quick:
Modern academia systematically excludes fundamental research via procedural rules and checkbox bureaucracy.
Quantum computing couldn’t have been invented without Everettian quantum mechanics.
Free will concerns knowledge creation, not violations of physics.
Memorable Quotes From The Podcast
“If any of my people is in the department at 9 a.m., it’s because they’ve been up all night.”
“Fund people, not projects.”
“Go for the thing that is fun rather than the thing that you think will lead to fun.”
Key Insights
Anti-Nepotism Backfires: Rules designed to ensure “fairness” mean only people who know nothing about a candidate can judge them. Those with actual knowledge are excluded from selection.
The Checkbox Problem: When Deutsch applied for quantum computing grants, no checkbox existed for it because computing wasn’t considered physics. Now there’s a checkbox, so you can get funded for incremental quantum computing work, but you still can’t get funded for inventing the next field that would create a new checkbox.
Fundamental vs. Foundational: Foundational research drills into the foundations of an existing field. Fundamental research is needed across multiple areas; quantum computation, for instance, touches mathematics, epistemology, physics, and engineering simultaneously.
Wheeler’s Paradox: John Wheeler hated the many-worlds interpretation but was a good enough supervisor to give Everett every opportunity to get his work seen. He sent the thesis to DeWitt, who eventually became Everett’s major backer.
Qubit Field Theory: Deutsch attempted a field theory where field values at each point are qubits (±1) rather than real numbers, eliminating infinities and non-localities. The theory is “perfectly well-behaved” mathematically but he couldn’t solve the measurement problem within it; the paper remains on arXiv, unpublished elsewhere.
The “Impossible” List: Deutsch keeps a personal list of advances he thought were impossible: the World Wide Web, Mathematica’s user-definable notation, laser guide stars, and most recently, X’s Community Notes.
In-Depth Timestamps
(00:00:00) Einstein’s Grant Application: Why Einstein couldn’t explain manifolds or the Riemann tensor to a grant committee, and how Max Planck’s personal intervention wouldn’t be allowed under today’s rules.
(00:07:00) Funding People, Not Projects: The research group leader should be funded because they’re “interested in stuff,” not because they can specify their next paper’s topic.
(00:12:35) Is Physics Stagnant?: Gravitational waves and topological insulators aren’t incremental. The problem is systemic bias against fundamental work, not absence of all progress.
(00:17:34) The Checkbox Problem: No grant form has a box for “things that haven’t been invented yet,” and adding one wouldn’t help because committees couldn’t evaluate it.
(00:26:05) Physics vs. Math Departments: Mathematicians celebrate strong publications; physicists ask about grant renewal plans.
(00:32:42) Fundamental vs. Foundational: Foundational drills into existing fields; fundamental is needed across multiple domains simultaneously.
(00:40:08) Physicists and Philosophy: Philosophy is crucial for foundations, but academic philosophy’s state of the art is “terrible”; internalizing it makes one less proficient.
(00:45:44) Why Academics Are Silent: Even tenured professors “slot into the system”; Deutsch traced a visa rule change through the hierarchy and found no one with authority to change it.
(00:51:20) The Problem of Quantum Gravity: The infinities are “trivial”; the real issue is that QFT describes fields on spacetime while GR treats spacetime itself as dynamical.
(00:58:31) Qubit Field Theory: A field of qubits at each spacetime point; no infinities, no non-localities, only a Heisenberg picture, but the measurement problem remains unsolved.
(01:03:18) Problem-Solving in Physics: String theory proceeds by proposing mathematical objects and asking what physics they might describe. Deutsch argues progress comes the other way around.
(01:17:14) Deutsch’s “Impossible” List: Mathematica, laser guide stars, the World Wide Web, Wikipedia (now crossed out), and Community Notes.
(01:24:23) Meeting Hugh Everett: Bryce DeWitt arranged the seating; Everett was “very intense,” a chain smoker, and enthusiastic about parallel universes contrary to the “relative states” framing Wheeler imposed.
(01:35:01) Susskind’s MWI Objections: Branches recombining and irrational probability weights. Deutsch explains why these are non-problems once you understand decoherence and emergent branching.
(01:46:44) Everett and Quantum Computing: Deutsch couldn’t have conceived quantum computation while thinking in collapse terms. Landauer slammed a door to “prove” error correction is impossible.
(01:56:20) Constructor Theory: Laws of physics reformulated as a dichotomy between transformations that can be brought about and those that cannot.
(02:03:01) Free Will and Knowledge: Free will isn’t overriding physics; it’s bringing genuinely new explanatory knowledge into existence, something not encoded in the Big Bang.
(02:09:08) Follow The Fun: Minimize prophecy in career decisions; the more you have to predict the future to justify a choice, the more error-prone it becomes.
Terms Defined
Fundamental Research: Research needed across multiple domains; it unites areas like mathematics, epistemology, and physics rather than drilling into one.
Foundational Research: Research that deepens understanding of an existing field’s foundations.
Constructor Theory: A framework reformulating physics as a dichotomy between possible and impossible transformations, developed by Deutsch and Chiara Marletto.
Qubit Field Theory: Deutsch’s unpublished attempt at a QFT where field values are ±1 (qubits) rather than real numbers; no infinities, only a Heisenberg picture.
Heisenberg Picture: A formulation of quantum mechanics where states are fixed and operators evolve in time, rather than the reverse (Schrödinger picture).
Born Rule: The rule that probabilities in quantum mechanics equal the squared amplitude of the wave function.
Decoherence: The process by which quantum superpositions become effectively classical through interaction with the environment; in Everett, it’s when branches stop affecting each other.
Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI): The interpretation holding that quantum mechanics is universally valid and that all branches of superposition are equally real.
Decision-Theoretic Approach: Deutsch’s derivation of the Born rule from quantum theory without probability plus classical decision theory without probability; no axiom of probability is assumed.
Universal Quantum Computer: A quantum system capable of simulating any physical process; proposed by Deutsch in 1985.
Resources Mentioned
Books:
David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity (2011)
Bryce DeWitt and Neill Graham, eds., The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (1973)
Papers:
David Deutsch, Qubit Field Theory (2004)
David Deutsch, Quantum Theory, the Church–Turing Principle and the Universal Quantum Computer (1985)
Hugh Everett, Letter to Bryce DeWitt (1957)
Related TOE Episodes:
Scott Aaronson on Quantum Computing and Complexity
Leonard Susskind on Quantum Mechanics and Many Worlds
Sean Carroll on Everettian Quantum Mechanics
David Wallace on Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics
Chiara Marletto on Constructor Theory
Roger Penrose on Consciousness and Physics
Stephen Wolfram on Computational Foundations
Neil Turok on Cosmology and Fundamental Physics
Robert Sapolsky on Free Will
Curt Jaimungal on How To Reverse Academia’s Stagnation
Open Questions & Counterarguments
Unresolved:
What is the geometry of the multiverse analogous to spacetime being a four-dimensional pseudo-Riemannian manifold?
Can qubit field theory’s measurement problem be solved, making it a viable alternative to standard QFT?
How can the funding landscape be restructured to incentivize fundamental research without falling into the same procedural traps?
Strongest Objection to Thesis 1 (Academia Excludes Fundamental Research): Gravitational wave detection, topological phases of matter, and exoplanet discoveries all emerged from within the current system; perhaps the system filters for quality rather than excluding fundamentality.
Strongest Objection to Thesis 2 (Quantum Computing Required Everett): Peter Shor and other pioneers of quantum algorithms didn’t explicitly invoke many-worlds; quantum computing might be interpretation-neutral at the practical level.
Strongest Objection to Thesis 3 (Free Will as Knowledge Creation): If knowledge creation is itself a physical process governed by deterministic (or stochastic) laws, then “bringing something new into the world” may be no different from any other lawful evolution, and the intuition of freedom remains unexplained.
Questions for You
Deutsch argues that anti-nepotism rules hurt research by excluding those who actually know the candidates. Do you think there’s a reform that preserves fairness while allowing informed judgment?
He keeps a list of things he thought were impossible that turned out to work. What’s on your list, and what does it tell you about the limits of your own intuition?
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Thank you. Please let me know how you like these show notes and what you would add or how I can make them more useful to you.
—Curt Jaimungal
The "fund people not projects" argument really cuts through the nonsense around grant bureaucracy. I've seenthe pattern where breakthrough work typically comes from researchers operating outside checkbox constraints, which partly explains why truly interdiscplinary fields always lag behind specialist funding categories. Deutsch's Everett lunch story also illustrates how much tacit knowledge transmission matters vs formal papers.
This guy seriously believes that the entire universe bifircates every time someone makes a choice. And then every time everyone in every one of THOSE replicant universes makes a choice, THAT universe bifurcates.
This is INSANE! Anyone who believes that the math trumps reality, is blue-pilled into a deep delusion.
The following post explains why the math he is using projects the appearance of duality.
https://roydopson.substack.com/p/i-know-why-qm-sees-duality-and-bifurcation?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&shareImageVariant=overlay&r=1y5bkg