The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

I am not asking what authority scientific knowledge is derived from, or rests on. I mean, literally, by what process do ever truer and more detailed explanations about the world come to be represented physically in our brains? How do we come to know about the interactions of subatomic particles during transmutation at the centre of a distant star, when even the tiny trickle of light that reaches our instruments from the star was emitted by glowing gas at the star’s surface, a million kilometres above where the transmutation is happening? Or about conditions in the fireball during the first few seconds after the Big Bang, which would instantly have destroyed any sentient being or scientific instrument? Or about the future, which we have no way of measuring at all? How is it that we can predict, with some non-negligible degree of confidence, whether a new design of microchip will work, or whether a new drug will cure a particular disease, even though they have never existed before? For most of human history, we did not know how to do any of this. People were not designing microchips or medications or even the wheel. For thousands of generations, our ancestors looked up at the night sky and wondered what stars are – what they are made of, what makes them shine, what their relationship is with each other and with us – which was exactly the right thing to wonder about. And they were using eyes and brains anatomically indistinguishable from those of modern astronomers. But they ...