
The Fabric of Reality
The Science of Parallel Universes - and Its Implications
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Narrated by:
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Walter Dixon
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By:
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David Deutsch
About this listen
Author of the New York Times best seller The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch, explores the four most fundamental strands of human knowledge: quantum physics, and the theories of knowledge, computation, and evolution - and their unexpected connections. Taken together, these four strands reveal a deeply integrated, rational, and optimistic worldview. It describes a unified fabric of reality that is objective and comprehensible, in which human action and thought are central.
With new preface exclusive to the audiobook, read by the author.
©1997, 1998 David Deutsch (P)2018 David DeutschListeners also enjoyed...
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- By: Chiara Marletto
- Narrated by: Katharine Lee McEwan
- Length: 7 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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There is a vast class of things that science has so far almost entirely neglected. They are central to the understanding of physical reality both at an everyday level and at the level of the most fundamental phenomena in physics, yet have traditionally been assumed to be impossible to incorporate into fundamental scientific explanations. They are facts not about what is (the actual) but about what could be (counterfactuals).
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Was Hoping for Depth
- By Evert on 06-19-21
By: Chiara Marletto
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The Meme Machine
- By: Susan Blackmore, Richard Dawkins - foreword
- Narrated by: Esther Wane
- Length: 11 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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First coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, a meme is any idea, behavior, or skill that can be transferred from one person to another by imitation. Susan Blackmore shows that once our distant ancestors acquired the crucial ability to imitate, a second kind of natural selection began, a survival of the fittest amongst competing ideas and behaviors. Ideas and behaviors that proved most adaptive-making tools, for example, or using language - survived and flourished, replicating themselves in as many minds as possible.
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memes are gut bacteria, not godlike puppet masters
- By Hans Thieme on 02-14-22
By: Susan Blackmore, and others
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The Fabric of the Cosmos
- Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality
- By: Brian Greene
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 22 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Space and time form the very fabric of the cosmos. Yet they remain among the most mysterious of concepts. Is space an entity? Why does time have a direction? Could the universe exist without space and time? Can we travel to the past?
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Lucid, Revealing, Thorough
- By Matthew on 02-23-04
By: Brian Greene
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White Holes
- By: Carlo Rovelli
- Narrated by: Harry Lloyd
- Length: 2 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Let us journey, with beloved physicist Carlo Rovelli, into the heart of a black hole. We slip beyond its horizon and tumble down this crack in the universe. As we plunge, we see geometry fold. Time and space pull and stretch. And finally, at the black hole’s core, space and time dissolve, and a white hole is born. Rovelli has dedicated his career to uniting the time-warping ideas of general relativity and the perplexing uncertainties of quantum mechanics. In White Holes, he reveals the mind of a scientist at work.
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This guy…
- By Nicholas on 12-13-23
By: Carlo Rovelli
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An Introduction to Information Theory
- Symbols, Signals and Noise
- By: John R. Pierce
- Narrated by: Kyle Tait
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Behind the familiar surfaces of the telephone, radio, and television lies a sophisticated and intriguing body of knowledge known as information theory. This is the theory that has permitted the rapid development of all sorts of communication, from color television to the clear transmission of photographs from the vicinity of Jupiter. Even more revolutionary progress is expected in the future.
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Not bad, but...
- By Jane Doe on 06-26-20
By: John R. Pierce
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Existential Physics
- A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions
- By: Sabine Hossenfelder
- Narrated by: Gina Daniels
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Not only can we not currently explain the origin of the universe, it is questionable we will ever be able to explain it. The notion that there are universes within particles, or that particles are conscious, is ascientific, as is the hypothesis that our universe is a computer simulation. On the other hand, the idea that the universe itself is conscious is difficult to rule out entirely.
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Unscientific and unengaging
- By Jase G on 03-29-23
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Minds Make Societies
- How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create
- By: Pascal Boyer
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 13 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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“There is no good reason why human societies should not be described and explained with the same precision and success as the rest of nature.” Thus argues evolutionary psychologist Pascal Boyer in this uniquely innovative book. Integrating recent insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and other fields, Boyer offers precise models of why humans engage in social behaviors such as forming families, tribes, and nations, or creating gender roles.
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Paradoxical Evolutionary Psychology?
- By Stanley Lippman on 07-01-20
By: Pascal Boyer
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The Biggest Ideas in the Universe
- Space, Time, and Motion
- By: Sean Carroll
- Narrated by: Sean Carroll
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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The most trusted explainer of the most mind-boggling concepts pulls back the veil of mystery that has too long cloaked the most valuable building blocks of modern science. Sean Carroll, with his genius for making complex notions entertaining, presents in his uniquely lucid voice the fundamental ideas informing the modern physics of reality. In the tradition of the legendary Richard Feynman lectures presented sixty years ago, this book is an inspiring, dazzling introduction to a way of seeing that will resonate across cultural and generational boundaries for many years to come.
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Accompanying PDF is Included
- By Barton on 11-21-22
By: Sean Carroll
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Safe Haven
- Investing for Financial Storms
- By: Mark Spitznagel
- Narrated by: Fred Berman
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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What is a safe haven? What role should they play in an investment portfolio? Do we use them only to seek shelter until the passing of financial storms? Or are they something more? Contrary to everything we know from modern financial theory, can higher returns actually come as a result of lowering risk? In Safe Haven, hedge fund manager Mark Spitznagel - one of the top practitioners of safe haven investing and portfolio risk mitigation in the world - answers these questions and more.
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blah
- By JW on 09-21-21
By: Mark Spitznagel
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Deep Utopia
- Life and Meaning in a Solved World
- By: Nick Bostrom
- Narrated by: David Timson
- Length: 20 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Bostrom’s previous book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (OUP, 2014) sparked a global conversation on AI that continues to this day. That book, which became a surprise New York Times bestseller, focused on what might happen if AI development goes wrong. But what if things go right? Suppose we develop superintelligence safely and ethically, and that we make good use of the almost magical powers this technology would unlock.
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In incredibly entertaining presentation
- By Richard Dean on 03-11-25
By: Nick Bostrom
Good, but not so great as I thought it would be
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Deeply provocative.
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Smart thinker, hard for a layman
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The second best science book I have read
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Fantastic read
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1) I was a “reductionist” for thinking of us as a Tegmark “atom heap” (Deutsch argues matter creates mind AND mind creates matter);
2) it’s explanatory not predictive power that makes theory valuable;
3) “many worlds” is the best explanation for quantum theory measurements;
4) when considered together, his “four strands” of Popperian Epistemology, Darwin/Dawkins evolution, Turing/quantum computation, and quantum theory all have more to say about each other than they do about reality alone;
5) there is no “foundation” and it’s fallibility all the way down;
6) the meat computers in our head are already “AI”;
And much more.
HOWEVER it would be hard to conceive a WORSE reader for this book. The “performance” was utterly robotic and fake sounding. The reader seemed to be able to mouth vocalizations that are understandable as “English language sounds” while simultaneously avoiding any kind of meta data (pauses in the correct spaces, emphasis, inflection, etc) that would convey MEANING and UNDERSTANDING of English as a language, much less this book. I seriously thought the joke at the end was going to be that it turned out to have been read by a computer. A bad computer...
David Deutsch has such a wonderful voice and sense of humor — I would so love it if he were to read this book himself. The other sad coda here — this SAME terrible reader reads David Deutch’s other book the “beginning of infinity.” Bummer.
One of the best books I’ve ever read but one of the worst readers
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Pompous and Verbose
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Great narration
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Profound and eye opening
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Reality from a computers point of view.
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