"The universe is not an electronic digital computer, it's not running some operating system, and it's not running Windows."

Rating:

  rate this quote
Topic: none  help us select a topic for this quote

More quotes from: Seth Lloyd

• "A typical state of the ultimate laptop's memory looks like a plasma at a billion ..."
• "According to the standard model billions of years ago some little quantum fluctuation, perhaps a ..."
• "All physical systems can be thought of as registering and processing information, and how one ..."
• "Another feature that everybody notices about the universe is that it's complex. "
• "At some point, Moore's law will break down. "
• "But there is no particular reason why Moore's law should continue to hold: it is ..."
• "Clearly, packaging issues alone make it unlikely that this limit can be obtained, even setting ..."
• "Computers are famous for being able to do complicated things starting from simple programs. "
• "Every physical system registers information, and just by evolving in time, by doing its thing, ..."
• "From my perspective, it's also uncontroversial that the universe registers 10[90] bits of information, transforms ..."
• "I build quantum computers that store information on individual atoms and then massage the normal ..."
• "I have not proved that the universe is, in fact, a digital computer and that ..."
• "I would suggest, merely as a metaphor here, but also as the basis for a ..."
• "If you take a more Darwinian point of view the dynamics of the universe are ..."
• "If you trace that randomness down, you find that that randomness is actually arising from ..."
• "If you wanted to build the most powerful computer you could, you can't do better ..."
• "In order to figure out how to make atoms compute, you have to learn how ..."
• "In this metaphor we actually have a picture of the computational universe, a metaphor which ..."
• "Indeed, as the above calculation indicates, to take full advantage of the memory space available, ..."
• "Instead of having to be a member of the Royal Society to do science, the ..."
• "It's also a reasonable scientific program to look at the dynamics of the standard model ..."

• "It's been known for more than a hundred years, ever since Maxwell, that all physical ..."
• "Merely by existing and evolving in time - by existing - any physical system registers ..."
• "Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. "
• "Now it's hard to find a newspaper that doesn't have a weekly section on science. "
• "Of course, not everybody's willing to go out and do the experiments, but for the ..."
• "Of course, one way of thinking about all of life and civilization is as being ..."
• "One of the things that I've been doing recently in my scientific research is to ..."
• "People are becoming more and more interested in science, and that's because they realize that ..."
• "Science consists exactly of those forms of knowledge that can be verified and duplicated by ..."
• "Similarly, another famous little quantum fluctuation that programs you is the exact configuration of your ..."
• "Since I've been building quantum computers I've come around to thinking about the world in ..."
• "So science is basically, at it most fundamental level, a public form of knowledge, a ..."
• "Something else has happened with computers. "
• "That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay ..."
• "The amount of information that can be stored by the ultimate laptop, 10 to the ..."
• "The other neat thing about these quantum computers is that they're also storing a bit ..."
• "There are considerable advantages to using many degrees of freedom to store information, stability and ..."
• "Thinking of the universe as a computer is controversial. "
• "This democratization of science, this making it public, is in a sense the realization of ..."
• "This is because conventional laptops use many degrees of freedom to store a bit whereas ..."

• "We have a picture for how complexity arises, because if the universe is computationally capable, ..."
• "What's happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can ..."