The Beginning of Infinity

The claim

David Deutsch is a physicist at the University of Oxford, best known for founding the theory of quantum computation in the 1980s. His second book, The Beginning of Infinity, published in 2011, ranges across physics, biology, philosophy, politics and art, but it makes one central argument. Knowledge grows through the creation of good explanations; such explanations can always be improved; and because almost any problem can be solved by the right knowledge, there is no limit to human progress.

The title expresses the view. Before the scientific revolution, human societies made progress slowly and often lost it. With the Enlightenment, Deutsch argues, a tradition of criticism took hold that allowed knowledge to grow without limit. We are not near the end of discovery, as some have thought, but at its beginning, and will always be.

How the case is built

Deutsch begins with what makes an explanation good. Following Karl Popper, he rejects the idea that knowledge comes from observation or induction. All knowledge, he argues, begins as conjecture, a guess, and grows through criticism and testing. But not every testable theory is good. A good explanation is hard to vary: its details all play a role in accounting for what it explains, so they cannot be changed without destroying the explanation. His example is the ancient Greek myth that winter occurs when the goddess Persephone is in the underworld and her mother Demeter grieves. The myth explains winter, but its details could be changed at will to explain anything else. The explanation based on the tilt of the Earth’s axis is hard to vary, because every element is tied to what it predicts, including that the seasons are reversed in the two hemispheres.

He then argues for what he calls the principle of optimism: all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge. Any problem that does not violate the laws of physics can, in principle, be solved, given the right knowledge. This does not mean progress is guaranteed. It means that failure is never inevitable.

He introduces the idea of universality, the point at which a system becomes capable of an unlimited range of tasks. Alphabets, which can represent any word, replaced pictograms, which could not. Place-value number systems can express any number. Computers, once general enough, can perform any computation. And people, as creators of explanations, are universal explainers: capable, in principle, of understanding anything that can be understood. This, he argues, gives human beings cosmic significance. We are not insignificant chemical scum on a typical planet, as some have put it, but the only known entities capable of creating knowledge that can transform the universe.

He contrasts dynamic societies, which encourage criticism and change, with static ones, which suppress it to preserve their way of life. Athens and Sparta are his examples. Static societies are by far the more common in history, and they eventually fail because they cannot solve new problems.

What it takes for granted

The argument rests on Popper’s philosophy of science and extends it further than Popper did. Deutsch treats the criterion of good explanation as central to all knowledge, including morality and aesthetics, which he argues can be objective in the same way that science is. Philosophers who doubt that values can be objective, or who think scientific knowledge grows by other means, will resist these steps.

The principle of optimism also takes for granted that knowledge creation will continue, and that dangers, such as those from new technologies, will be met by more knowledge rather than by restraint. Deutsch argues against what he sees as pessimistic restrictions on progress, including strong versions of the precautionary principle, on the grounds that the unknown risks of not progressing are greater. Others weigh those risks differently.

Since it was published

The book has a devoted following among scientists, technologists and people interested in the idea of progress. Its arguments are often cited in debates about artificial intelligence. Deutsch has argued that creating genuine artificial general intelligence will require understanding how people create explanations, something he believes current approaches do not do. The rise of large language models since 2022 has made his views on what counts as creativity and knowledge a subject of active discussion. The site’s essay The Machine That Answers explores some of the same questions, and the idea page Silent Evidence shows how bad explanations can persist when evidence is incomplete.

What it asks of someone deciding

The book asks whether your explanations are hard to vary. A strategy that would justify any outcome, or a theory of the market that fits every result, explains nothing. Good explanations make risky claims that could be shown wrong.

It asks whether your organisation is dynamic or static. Organisations that suppress criticism to protect their culture may survive for a time, but they lose the capacity to solve new problems. A tradition of criticism is the engine of improvement.

And it asks whether you treat problems as soluble. Deutsch’s optimism is not a mood but a methodological claim: if something is not forbidden by the laws of physics, the question is what knowledge would be needed to achieve it. Asking that question opens possibilities that pessimism closes.