The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

This knowledge-based approach to explaining human events follows from the general arguments of this book. We know that achieving arbitrary physical transformations that are not forbidden by the laws of physics (such as replanting a forest) can only be a matter of knowing how. We know that finding out how is a matter of seeking good explanations. We also know that whether a particular attempt to make progress will succeed or not is profoundly unpredictable. It can be understood in retrospect, but not in terms of factors that could have been known in advance. Thus we now understand why alchemists never succeeded at transmutation: because they would have had to understand some nuclear physics first. But this could not have been known at the time. And the progress that they did make – which led to the science of chemistry – depended strongly on how individual alchemists thought, and only peripherally on factors like which chemicals could be found nearby. The conditions for a beginning of infinity exist in almost every human habitation on Earth.