Science Quote by David Deutsch

Deutsch is picking a fight with the cult of “common sense” and betting that science wins on elegance, not just accuracy. The line sounds like a provocation, but it’s really a manifesto for a certain kind of intellectual adulthood: the willingness to let reality revise your intuitions, then notice that the revision isn’t merely tolerable - it’s clarifying.

The first jab is at the idea that everyday intuition is a neutral baseline. “Common sense” is a toolbox tuned for mid-sized objects, slow speeds, and social guessing games. It feels authoritative because it’s familiar, not because it’s reliable. Deutsch’s twist is the double claim: good theories are “truer” and they “make more sense.” That second phrase is the bait. He’s arguing that deep explanations don’t just correct surface-level mistakes (Earth orbits the sun); they reorganize what counts as sense-making (gravity as geometry, randomness as probability, time as a dimension with rules).

Subtext: if a theory strikes you as weird, that weirdness may be a symptom of your expectations, not the world’s. Deutsch’s broader context - his work on quantum computation and his Popper-influenced emphasis on explanation and testability - treats knowledge as something that grows by replacing parochial intuitions with frameworks that are broader, tighter, and less sentimental. The line flatters science, yes, but it also disciplines it: “best theories” aren’t piles of data. They’re the ones that compress chaos into principles so coherent that, once learned, “common sense” starts to look like the naive story.