David Deutsch
David Deutsch, FRS is a British physicist at the University of Oxford. He is a non-stipendiary Visiting Professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the Centre for Quantum Computation (CQC) in the Clarendon Laboratory of the University of Oxford. He pioneered the field of quantum computation by being the first person to formulate a description for a quantum Turing machine, as well as specifying an algorithm designed to run on a quantum computer. He is also a proponent of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
In his books, he also made philosophical contributions. In epistemology, he stressed the importance of explanation, and proposed 'hard to vary' as a criterion for good explanations. In memetics, he gave an account of how memes work, separating them into 'dynamic' or rational memes and 'static' or anti-rational memes. He also advocates optimism, potentially boundless progress, objective beauty in aesthetics, and reason.
“Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilisation or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.”
“Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow.”
“The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.”