Buy new:
£10.95£10.95
FREE delivery:
Wednesday, June 21
in the UK
Dispatches from: Amazon Sold by: Amazon
Buy used £6.80
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World Paperback – 26 Jan. 2012
| Amazon Price | New from | Used from |
|
Kindle Edition
"Please retry" | — | — |
|
Audible Audiobooks, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
£0.00
| Free with your Audible trial | |
|
Audio CD, CD, Unabridged
"Please retry" | £66.00 | — |
Purchase options and add-ons
In our search for truth, how far have we advanced? This uniquely human quest for good explanations has driven amazing improvements in everything from scientific understanding and technology to politics, moral values and human welfare. But will progress end, either in catastrophe or completion - or will it continue indefinitely?
In this profound and seminal book, David Deutsch explores the furthest reaches of our current understanding, taking in the Infinity Hotel, supernovae and the nature of optimism, to instill in all of us a wonder at what we have achieved - and the fact that this is only the beginning of humanity's infinite possibility.
- Print length496 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin
- Publication date26 Jan. 2012
- Dimensions19.7 x 12.9 x 2.96 cm
- ISBN-100140278168
- ISBN-13978-0140278163
Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Special offers and product promotions
- Save 5% on any 4 qualifying items. Discount by Amazon. Shop items
Product description
Review
Bold ... profound ... provocative and persuasive. ― The Economist
Science has never had an advocate quite like David Deutsch. He is a computational physicist on a par with his touchstones Alan Turing and Richard Feynman, and also a philosopher in the line of his greatest hero, Karl Popper. His arguments are so clear that to read him is to experience the thrill of the highest level of discourse available on this planet and to understand it. -- Peter Forbes ― The Independent
This is Deutsch at his most ambitious, seeking to understand the implications of our scientific explanations of the world ... I enthusiastically recommend this rich, wide-ranging and elegantly written exposition of the unique insights of one of our most original intellectuals. -- Michael Berry ― Times Higher Education Supplement
David Deutsch...may well go down in history as one of the great scientists of our age. -- Andrew Crumey ― The Scotsman
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Penguin; Later Edition (26 Jan. 2012)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 496 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0140278168
- ISBN-13 : 978-0140278163
- Dimensions : 19.7 x 12.9 x 2.96 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 11,466 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 3 in Mathematical Physics (Books)
- 12 in Quantum Physics
- 15 in Philosophy of Physics
- Customer reviews:
About the author

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings, help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyses reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from United Kingdom
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
The Enlightenment considered progress as both desirable and feasible. The means for progress was the creation of theories with good explanatory power;we have to caution that there is no finality in a theory but only improvement through conjecture, criticism and testing. A theory must be testable;that is a theory can make predictions which, if the theory were false could be contradicted by the outcome of some possible observations. Each successive theory has more truth that is, it is a better representation of physical reality and has correspondingly a lower level of misconception than the one it has superseded. Viewed in this light Einstein's Misconception of Gravity was an improvement on Newton's Misconception which was an improvement on Kepler's. The neo-Darwinian Misconception of Evolution is an improvement on Darwin's Misconception and his on Lamarck's. Consequently people should be conscious that science claims neither infallibility nor finality.
Two very important - I am almost tempted to say defining characteristics - of good explanatory theories are:
The first is reach:one of the most remarkable things about science is the contrast between the enormous reach and power of our best theories and the precarious, local means by which we create them.
The second characteristic is that theories with good explanatory power are hard to vary. Scientific theories are hard to vary because they correspond closely with an objective truth, which is independent of our culture, our preferences, and our biological make up. But the author also argues convincingly that there is objective truth in the beauty of music, art and nature (flowers). 'Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall.' That is how Mozart's music is described in Peter Shaffer's 1979 play Amadeus. This is reminiscent of the remark by John Archibald Wheeler with which this book begins, speaking of a hoped-for unified theory of fundamental physics:'an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it... how it could have been otherwise?' Shaffer and Wheeler were describing the same attribute:being hard to vary while still doing the job. In the first case it is an attribute of aesthetically good music, and in the second of good scientific explanations.
Our ability to formulate explanations, conjectures, and criticisms is, of course, due to a uniquely human biological adaptation namely creativity which is concurrently a jump to universality.
There is an increasingly intimate connection between explaining the world and controlling it which is no accident but part of the deep structure of the world. The ability to use explanatory knowledge gives people a power to tranform nature which is ultimately limited only by universal laws e.g the speed of light. Human beings are consequently universal constructors of all technological innovations.
No good explanation can predict the outcome, or the probability of an outcome, of a phenomenon whose course is going to be significantly affected by the creation of new knowledge. This is a fundamental limitation on the reach of scientific prediction, and, when planning for the future, it is vital to come to terms with it. Following Popper, the author uses the terms 'prediction' for conclusions about future events that follow from good explanations, and 'prophesy' for anything that purports to know what is not yet knowable.
The perennial pessimism about the future so familiar in the human condition is often due to the mixing of prediction and prophesy. A famous example was that of Malthus which mixed the reasonable prediction of the increase of population and the prophesy of the level of future food production which proved spectacularly wrong.
The sustained creation of knowledge depends on the presence of certain kinds of idea, particularly optimism, and an associated tradition of criticism. There would have to be social and political institutions that incorporated and protected such traditions:a society in which some degree of dissent and deviation from the norm was tolerated, and whose educational practices did not actively extinguish creativity.
In the optimistic conception - the one that was unforseeably vindicated by events - people are problem solvers:creators of the unsustainable solution and hence also of the next problem. In the pessimistic conception that distinctive ability of people is a disease for which sustainability is the cure. in the optimistic one, sustainability is the disease and people are the cure.
Reading the book was for me a life enriching bordering on a life changing experience.
At times I felt that Deutsch pushes his arguments a little too far. For example, he disagrees with Jared Diamond's assertion in Guns, Steel and Germs that the availability of resources such as wild animals that can be domesticated is the major determinant of how succesful a society will be, and claims that the ability to generate new knowledge is more important, without clearly explaning why some societies are better able to generate this knowledge. Deutsch's argument reminded of the sterile "nature versus nuture" debate. In biology most now agree that environmental and genetic factors overlap and are both important, and it seems likely to me that environmental factors caused by geography are highly relevant to explain the difference between societies. For me this controversy added to rather than detracted from the book, by making it even more thought provoking.
This is a very important book that should be on everyones must read list. After reading the book I found myself looking at familar topics in a new way. It is a long book, but well worth reading to the end.
However, the author ranges very broadly, and the chapters, hardly related to the main premise, had a generally negative impact on me. For example, he includes a chapter on choice concerning voting systems, which I thought irrelevant to the main thrust of the book, and uniquely for the author, it did not seem to have been thought through; he appears to put forward the argument prevalent before the Great Reform Act that it did not matter how MPs were chosen as long as they formed a body capable of weighing the matters before them. In addition, Professor Deutsch has given space to attacks on those who hold to different beliefs and philosophies to himself, such as empiricists, instrumentalists, and those of religious belief. I would be on his side in at least some of these cases, but the problem is that he is only able to make his views known forcefully, but cannot possibly present the fully developed arguments that characterise the rest of the book. The effect of what I have to call digressions, together with the 25 page dialogue with Socrates, is to make the book significantly longer than it might have been. To do justice to it, I found myself reading one or two chapters at a time so I read it over a time span of 3 weeks. As a result of this and what I found a slightly haphazard ordering of the chapters, I found myself referring back far more often than normal. I think that with tighter editing, the book could have been shortened by close to a third, reducing my problems significantly, and I really hope that this is done for some future edition.







