The Nature of Explanations

In this, the second part of discussion about the first chapter of “The Fabric of Reality”, we delve more deeply into what the distinction between “The theory of everything” that particle physicists have in mind and what David Deutsch’s more encompassing, more grand vision is for a unification of our deepest theories (of which the particle-physicists hoped-for unification of the forces is only a part). The former, purely physics-of-motion theory may be “predictive” in some sense but not fully explanatory. We discuss the crucial importance of the concept of “emergence” and I end this episode with “The Parable of the Copper Atom” which is first encountered here, in this first chapter of “FoR” - makes a comeback in “The Beginning of Infinity” and has taken on a life of its own out there in social media and philosophical space as a withering refutation of reductionism.