Words matter. These are the best Seth Lloyd Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
One of the things that I’ve been doing recently in my scientific research is to ask this question: Is the universe actually capable of performing things like digital computations?
What’s happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can register and process huge amounts of information, which is a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process.
Of course, one way of thinking about all of life and civilization is as being about how the world registers and processes information. Certainly that’s what sex is about; that’s what history is about.
In order to figure out how to make atoms compute, you have to learn how to speak their language and to understand how they process information under normal circumstances.
I have not proved that the universe is, in fact, a digital computer and that it’s capable of performing universal computation, but it’s plausible that it is.
I would suggest, merely as a metaphor here, but also as the basis for a scientific program to investigate the computational capacity of the universe, that this is also a reasonable explanation for why the universe is complex.
At some point, Moore’s law will break down.
Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics.
The amount of information that can be stored by the ultimate laptop, 10 to the 31st bits, is much higher than the 10 to the 10th bits stored on current laptops.
Indeed, as the above calculation indicates, to take full advantage of the memory space available, the ultimate laptop must turn all its matter into energy.
It’s also a reasonable scientific program to look at the dynamics of the standard model and to try to prove from that dynamics that it is computationally capable.
Instead of having to be a member of the Royal Society to do science, the way you had to be in England in the 17th, 18th, centuries today pretty much anybody who wants to do it can, and the information that they need to do it is there.
Something else has happened with computers.
Of course, not everybody’s willing to go out and do the experiments, but for the people who are willing to go out and do that, – if the experiments don’t work, then it means it’s not science.
Similarly, another famous little quantum fluctuation that programs you is the exact configuration of your DNA.
