Deutsch points to previous moments in history, such as Renaissance Florence and Plato's Academy in Golden Age Athens, where this process almost got underway before succumbing to their static societies' resistance to change.

New ideas that provide good explanations for phenomena require outside-the-box thinking as the unknown is not easily predicted from past experience.

To test this Deutsch suggests an AI behavioural evolution program for robot locomotion should be fed random numbers to see if knowledge spontaneously arises without inadvertent contamination from a human programmer's creative input.

Deutsch criticizes Jared Diamond's resource luck theories as to why the West came to dominate the other continents outlined in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel.

David Albert, a philosophy professor at Columbia University, has described the book in a New York Times review as "brilliant and exhilarating" but presenting, instead of a "tight, grand, cumulative system of ideas," a "great, wide, learned, meandering conversation".

[5] He also states that Deutsch does not present "a live scientific hypothesis," but a "mood informed by profound and imaginative reflection on the best and most advanced science we have".

[6] The Economist's review says The Beginning of Infinity is "equally bold" as Deutsch's previous book The Fabric of Reality, and "its conclusions are just as profound.