David Deutsch

David Elieser Deutsch (born 18 May 1953, Haifa, Israel) is a British physicist at the University of Oxford.

He is a 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 formulating a description for a quantum Turing machine, as well as specifying an algorithm designed to run on a quantum computer.

He has also proposed the use of entangled states and Bell's theorem for quantum key distribution and is a proponent of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Deutsch was born into a Jewish family in Haifa, Israel on 18 May 1953, the son of Oskar and Tikva Deutsch.

In London, David attended Geneva House school in Cricklewood (his parents owned and ran the Alma restaurant on Cricklewood Broadway), followed by William Ellis School in Highgate (then a voluntary aided school in north London) before reading Natural Sciences at Clare College, Cambridge and taking Part III of the Mathematical Tripos.

He went on to Wolfson College, Oxford for his doctorate in theoretical physics and wrote his thesis on quantum field theory in curved space-time supervised by Dennis Sciama and Philip Candelas.

His work on quantum algorithms began with a 1985 paper, later expanded in 1992 along with Richard Jozsa to produce the Deutsch–Jozsa algorithm, one of the first examples of a quantum algorithm that is exponentially faster than any possible deterministic classical algorithm.

In his 1985 paper, he also suggests the use of entangled states and Bell's theorem for quantum key distribution.

In his 1997 book The Fabric of Reality, Deutsch details his "Theory of Everything".

It aims not at the reduction of everything to particle physics, but rather mutual support among multiversal, computational, epistemological, and evolutionary principles.

His theory of everything is somewhat (weakly) emergentist rather than reductive.

There are four strands to his theory:

The Fabric of Reality was shortlisted for the Rhone-Poulenc science book award in 1998.

Deutsch was awarded the Dirac Prize of the Institute of Physics in 1998, and the Edge of Computation Science Prize in 2005.

Invariance as a fundamental aspect of a scientific account of reality had long been part of philosophy of science: for example, Friedel Weinert's book The Scientist as Philosopher (2004) noted the presence of the theme in many writings from around 1900 onward, such as works by Henri Poincaré (1902), Ernst Cassirer (1920), Max Born (1949 and 1953), Paul Dirac (1958), Olivier Costa de Beauregard (1966), Eugene Wigner (1967), Lawrence Sklar (1974), Michael Friedman (1983), John D. Norton (1992), Nicholas Maxwell (1993), Alan Cook (1994), Alistair Cameron Crombie (1994), Margaret Morrison (1995), Richard Feynman (1997), Robert Nozick (2001), and Tim Maudlin (2002).

In his nomination for election as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2008, his contributions were described as:

"[having] laid the foundations of the quantum theory of computation, and has subsequently made or participated in many of the most important advances in the field, including the discovery of the first quantum algorithms, the theory of quantum logic gates and quantum computational networks, the first quantum error-correction scheme, and several fundamental quantum universality results. He has set the agenda for worldwide research efforts in this new, interdisciplinary field, made progress in understanding its philosophical implications (via a variant of the many-universes interpretation) and made it comprehensible to the general public, notably in his book The Fabric of Reality."

Deutsch was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2008.

In a 2009 TED talk, Deutsch expounded a criterion for scientific explanation, which is to formulate invariants: "State an explanation [publicly, so that it can be dated and verified by others later] that remains invariant [in the face of apparent change, new information, or unexpected conditions]".

Deutsch's second book, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World, was published on 31 March 2011.

Since 2012, he has been working on constructor theory, an attempt at generalizing the quantum theory of computation to cover not just computation but all physical processes.

Together with Chiara Marletto, he published a paper in December 2014 entitled Constructor theory of information, that conjectures that information can be expressed solely in terms of which transformations of physical systems are possible and which are impossible.

In this book, he views the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries as near the beginning of a potentially unending sequence of purposeful knowledge creation.

He examines the nature of knowledge, memes, and how and why creativity evolved in humans.

In 2017, he received the Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP).

Deutsch is linked to Paul Dirac through his doctoral advisor Dennis Sciama, whose doctoral advisor was Dirac.

In 2018, he received the Micius Quantum Prize.

In 2021, he was awarded the Isaac Newton Medal and Prize.

On 22 September 2022, he was awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (sharing it with 3 others).

Deutsch is a founding member of the parenting and educational method Taking Children Seriously.

Deutsch supported Brexit, with his advocacy regularly being quoted by the then government adviser, Dominic Cummings.

In 2020 he was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Cybernetics Society.