David Elieser Deutsch (born May 18, 1953) is a British physicist at the University of Oxford. He is often called the "father of quantum computing." He works as a visiting professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the Centre for Quantum Computation (CQC) in the Clarendon Laboratory of the University of Oxford. He helped start the field of quantum computing by developing a way to explain a quantum Turing machine and creating an algorithm meant to run on a quantum computer. He supports the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Education

Deutsch was born on May 18, 1953, to a Jewish family in Haifa, Israel. His parents were Oskar and Tikva Deutsch. He attended Geneva House school in Cricklewood, London. His parents owned and operated the Alma restaurant on Cricklewood Broadway. Later, he went to William Ellis School in Highgate. He studied Natural Sciences at Clare College, Cambridge, and completed Part III of the Mathematical Tripos. He then earned a doctorate in theoretical physics at Wolfson College, Oxford, focusing on quantum field theory in curved space-time. His doctoral work was supervised by Dennis Sciama and Philip Candelas.

Career and research

His work on quantum algorithms started with a 1985 paper. He later worked with Richard Jozsa in 1992 to create the Deutsch–Jozsa algorithm, one of the first examples of a quantum algorithm that is much faster than any possible classical algorithm. In his nomination for election as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2008, his contributions were described as:

Since 2012, he has been working on constructor theory, a new way to describe the basic laws of physics. Instead of using initial conditions and equations of motion, this theory focuses on which physical changes are possible and which are not. In December 2014, he and Chiara Marletto published a paper titled "Constructor theory of information." This paper suggests that information can be described only by looking at which changes in physical systems are possible and which are not.

In his 1997 book The Fabric of Reality, Deutsch explains his views on quantum mechanics and his "Theory of Everything." This theory does not aim to reduce everything to particle physics but instead connects ideas from multiple fields, including the multiverse, computation, knowledge, and evolution. His theory is more about how these ideas support each other than about reducing everything to a single explanation. His theory has four parts:

• Hugh Everett’s many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, which he calls "the first and most important of the four strands."
• Karl Popper’s ideas about knowledge, especially his belief that scientific theories must be realist and not just tools for prediction, and his focus on bold ideas that are hard to prove wrong.
• Alan Turing’s theory of computation, which Deutsch updated to include quantum computers instead of traditional computers.
• Richard Dawkins’ work on evolution, including the concepts of replicators and memes, which connect with Popper’s ideas about problem-solving.

In a 2009 TED talk, Deutsch explained a rule for scientific explanations: they should describe things that stay the same even when new information or changes occur. This idea, called invariance, has been discussed by many scientists and philosophers, including Friedel Weinert, Henri Poincaré, Ernst Cassirer, Max Born, Paul Dirac, and others.

Deutsch’s second book, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World, was published on March 31, 2011. In this book, he describes the British Enlightenment as the start of a long process of creating new knowledge. He also discusses the nature of knowledge, memes, and how creativity developed in humans.

The Fabric of Reality was shortlisted for the Rhone-Poulenc science book award in 1998. Deutsch received the Dirac Prize from the Institute of Physics in 1998 and the Edge of Computation Science Prize in 2005. In 2017, he was awarded the Dirac Medal by the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP). He is connected to Paul Dirac through his doctoral advisor, Dennis Sciama, whose advisor was Dirac. Deutsch became a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2008. In 2018, he received the Micius Quantum Prize. In 2021, he was given the Isaac Newton Medal and Prize. On September 22, 2022, he was awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, which he shared with Charles H. Bennett, Gilles Brassard, and Peter Shor.

Personal life

Deutsch is one of the original members of the parenting and education approach called Taking Children Seriously.

Deutsch describes antisemitism as a repeated pattern of unreasonable thinking that exists in many cultures. This pattern is used to justify harming Jewish people simply because they are Jewish. He explains that this pattern continues because, when old reasons for hating Jewish people are no longer valid, new ones are created to replace them. Deutsch compares this to how gold remains valuable not because it has special qualities, but because people know others value it. He sees Zionism as the modern Jewish response to this pattern and identifies himself as an atheist Zionist.

Deutsch supported Brexit. His views were quoted by then-government adviser Dominic Cummings and reported by The New Yorker in January 2020.

Michael Gove referenced Deutsch’s views during a BBC Brexit debate. Later, Deutsch stated that he was not involved in any campaign support for Brexit. His public comments on the issue were quoted by Cummings and Gove independently, as Deutsch clarified afterward.