Quantum Pioneer Explains the Theory That Reimagines Physics
What if you could ask physics not how a thing happens, but whether it could ever happen at all? That second question, the one most equations skip right over, is the whole point of something called Constructor Theory.
Oxford physicist Chiara Marletto sat down with Anders Indset, the host of the Quantum Economy Podcast, to talk about the framework she’s developing alongside David Deutsch, the same Deutsch who helped invent quantum computing. The conversation ran through time, consciousness, artificial intelligence, and the state of science funding.
The basic idea is this: Constructor Theory flips the usual scientific approach. Standard physics writes down a starting state, applies some laws, and tells you what happens next. Marletto and Deutsch ask a different thing entirely. They ask what transformations are possible in the universe, which ones are forbidden, and what explains the difference. Everything else gets built on top of that foundation.
Why does this approach even exist?
Because some of the deepest concepts in science, things like life and information, don’t fit cleanly into the predict-the-next-moment model. Marletto argues you understand them better by asking what they can and can’t do. A copying process either works or it doesn’t. The theory wants to nail down which possibilities are real.
In the interview, Marletto extends the framework toward questions physics usually treats as off-limits. Consciousness comes up, and so does the nature of time, and whether AI sits inside the same rules that govern everything else. The argument is that these are all problems about what’s possible, as opposed to being separate mysteries that call for individual theories.
She also gets pointed about how science gets paid for. In her view, the current funding setup pushes researchers toward safe incremental work and starves the long-shot foundational ideas that occasionally rewrite a field. Constructor Theory itself is exactly the kind of bet that struggles to find money.
David Deutsch is one of the founders of quantum computation and a major voice in the philosophy of physics. He and Marletto have been publishing on Constructor Theory for over a decade, with papers covering information, thermodynamics, and the foundations of physics. The work remains early and contested, as plenty of physicists believe it delivers nothing more than the existing toolkit already does, and that debate is ongoing.
The interview doesn’t settle any of it. But it does lay out, in plain terms, why a couple of serious people think the question itself is worth changing. Whether the rest of physics agrees is another thing.