"I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it"
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Deutsch isn’t predicting a DeLorean; he’s staking out a philosophy of scientific ambition. The phrasing is telling: “I myself believe” signals a personal wager, but it’s immediately tethered to a stern criterion - not what feels plausible, not what engineers can do today, but what the “over-arching laws of physics” allow. That’s the Deutsch move: treat physics as the constitution of reality, then treat technology as the inevitable legislation that follows once something is ruled constitutional.
The subtext is a rebuke to a certain kind of skepticism. People often dismiss time travel as fantasy because it clashes with common-sense causality or because no one can imagine the apparatus. Deutsch flips the burden of proof: if the laws don’t explicitly ban it, history suggests we’ll eventually build it. It’s an argument by precedent - the repeated pattern that theoretical permission becomes practical capability, given enough time, ingenuity, and pressure.
Context matters. Deutsch is a foundational figure in quantum computing and a defender of the many-worlds interpretation, where “time travel” can be framed without the usual grandfather-paradox melodrama. His confidence also reflects a late-20th-century physics mood: once you accept black holes, expanding universes, and quantum weirdness, the line between “impossible” and “merely not yet engineered” gets redrawn.
There’s also a quiet provocation here: technology isn’t just applied science; it’s the physical world catching up to our explanations of it. If the universe permits loopholes, humans tend to learn how to crawl through them.
The subtext is a rebuke to a certain kind of skepticism. People often dismiss time travel as fantasy because it clashes with common-sense causality or because no one can imagine the apparatus. Deutsch flips the burden of proof: if the laws don’t explicitly ban it, history suggests we’ll eventually build it. It’s an argument by precedent - the repeated pattern that theoretical permission becomes practical capability, given enough time, ingenuity, and pressure.
Context matters. Deutsch is a foundational figure in quantum computing and a defender of the many-worlds interpretation, where “time travel” can be framed without the usual grandfather-paradox melodrama. His confidence also reflects a late-20th-century physics mood: once you accept black holes, expanding universes, and quantum weirdness, the line between “impossible” and “merely not yet engineered” gets redrawn.
There’s also a quiet provocation here: technology isn’t just applied science; it’s the physical world catching up to our explanations of it. If the universe permits loopholes, humans tend to learn how to crawl through them.
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| Topic | Science |
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