"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."
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Seth Lloyd quotes (page 1 of 3)
41 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"All physical systems can be thought of as registering and processing information, and how one wishes to define computation will determine your view of what computation consists of."
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"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?"
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"Computers are famous for being able to do complicated things starting from simple programs."
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"Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes, and the second law of thermodynamics."
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"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."
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"Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions."
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"We couldn't build quantum computers unless the universe were quantum and computing. We can build such machines because the universe is storing and processing information in the quantum realm. When we build quantum computers, we're hijacking that underlying computation in order to make it do things we want: little and/or/not calculations. We're hacking into the universe."
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"The history of the universe is, in effect, a huge and ongoing quantum computation. The universe is a quantum computer."
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"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."
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"According to the standard model billions of years ago some little quantum fluctuation, perhaps a slightly lower density of matter, maybe right where we're sitting right now, caused our galaxy to start collapsing around here."
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"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."
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"There are considerable advantages to using many degrees of freedom to store information, stability and controllability being perhaps the most important."
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"Thinking of the universe as a computer is controversial."
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"When you zap things with light to build quantum computers, you're hacking existing systems. You're hijacking the computation that's already happening in the universe, just like a hacker takes over someone else's computer."
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"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."
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"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."
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"If you take a more Darwinian point of view the dynamics of the universe are such that as the universe evolved in time, complex systems arose out of the natural dynamics of the universe."
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"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."
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"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."
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