The Fabric of Reality

Again, we must bear in mind that if the prisoners are scientists, they will be seeking explanations as well as predictions. In other words, they will not be content with merely knowing the program that operates their prison: they will want to explain the origin and attributes of the various entities, including themselves, that they observe in the r

They cannot both be true. We shall see that neither is true.

Not all fundamental phenomena have large physical effects.

As astronomical predictions became more accurate, the differences between what successive theories predicted about the appearance of the night sky diminished. Ever more powerful telescopes and measuring instruments have had to be constructed to detect the differences. However, the explanations underlying these predictions have not been converging.

The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy – but the ones that contain the deepest explanations. The fabric of reality does not consist only of reductionist ingredients like space, time and subatomic particles, but

What the computer’s description evokes in a reader’s mind is not just a single image or sequence of images, but a general method of creating many different images, corresponding to the many ways in which the reader may contemplate making observations. In other words, it is a virtual-reality rendering.

It rapidly became common ground that the new theory required a radical departure from the classical conception of the fabric of reality.

Now let us re-examine another assumption of Plato’s: the assumption that we do not have access to perfection in the physical world. He may be right that we shall not find perfect honour or justice, and he is certainly right that we shall not find the laws of physics or the set of all natural numbers. But we can find a perfect hand in bridge, or the

This intuition, by the way, caused many mathematicians to worry when, in 1976, Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken used a computer to prove the famous ‘four-colour conjecture’