Four Strands of Everything
Book Review: David Deutsch, "The Fabric of Reality", Penguin Books, 1998. According to David Deutsch, science is not about attaining a collection of facts or predictions, but about explaining and understanding the fabric of reality. Despite the fact that the growth in our knowledge has led to the specialization of subjects into sub-fields as theories become broader, it is also true that at the same time, our theories have been superseded by deeper ones that simplify and unify the existing ones -- and Deutsch argues that depth is winning over breadth. In other words, we are heading toward a situation where one person would be able to understand "everything that is understood", thanks to a couple of deep, fundamental theories that contain within them the explanations of all subjects. We will have a Theory of Everything , and Deutsch is confident that he has a candidate for such a theory with his "four main strands" that together form a coherent explana...