Seth Lloyd Quotes

Computers are famous for being able to do complicated things starting from simple programs.

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.

The history of the universe is, in effect, a huge and ongoing quantum computation. The universe is a quantum computer.

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes, and the second law of thermodynamics.

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.

Quantum mechanics is weird. I don't understand it. Just live with it. You don't have to understand the nature of things in order to build cool devices.

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.

Thinking of the universe as a computer is controversial.

Bits of ignorance are like viruses that are copied and spread by interaction.

When it comes to their capacity to screw things up, computers are becoming more human every day.

At some point, Moore's law will break down.

[With quantum computers] you can calculate how many bits are in the universe, how much energy it takes to flip them, how much energy exists, and use that to rule out lots of things about the universe's history. Anything that takes more bit flips couldn't have happened.

Programmed by quanta, physics gave rise first to chemistry and then to life; programmed by mutations and recombination, life gave rise to Shakespeare; programmed by experience and imagination, Shakespeare gave rise to Hamlet.

If you wanted to build the most powerful computer you could, you can't do better than including everything in the universe that's potentially available.

The primary consequence of the computational nature of the universe is that the universe naturally generates complex systems, such as life. Although the basic laws of physics are comparatively simple in form, they give rise, because they are computationally universal, to systems of enormous complexity.

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.

Quantum mechanics is just completely strange and counterintuitive. We can't believe that things can be here [in one place] and there [in another place] at the same time. And yet that's a fundamental piece of quantum mechanics. So then the question is, life is dealing us weird lemons, can we make some weird lemonade from this?

Science consists exactly of those forms of knowledge that can be verified and duplicated by anybody.

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.

Unlike mathematical theorems, scientific results can't be proved. They can only be tested again and again, until only a fool would not believe them. I cannot prove that electrons exist..........if you don't believe in them I have a high voltage cattle prod I'm willing to apply as an argument on their behalf. Electrons speak for themselves.

There are considerable advantages to using many degrees of freedom to store information, stability and controllability being perhaps the most important.

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?

Science has an uncomfortable way of pushing human beings from center stage. In our prescientific stories, humans began as the focal point of Nature, living on an Earth that was the center of the universe. As the origins of the Earth and of mankind were investigated more carefully, it became clear that Nature had other interests beyond people, and the Earth was less central than previously hoped. Humankind was just one branch of the great family of life, and the Earth is a smallish planet orbiting an unexceptional sun quite far out on one arm of a run-of-the-mill spiral galaxy.

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.

Yes, I am a quantum mechanic! Those darn quantum computers break all the time.