Programming the Universe                                                                                                                               

Questions and Answers are cited below as "Q" and "A"

Two articles from the Los Angeles Times:

(1) From the Los Angeles Times Book Review section, Sunday April 2, 2006: Margaret Wertheim writes on the topic of "Cosmic Data: in her book review of Seth Lloyd's book entitled: "Programming the Universe, A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos."

"Seth Lloyd sets out to convince us that information is the foundation of reality itself and that the cosmos may be seen as a vast computer for processing and transforming data.

Lloyd is a professor of quantum mechanical engineering at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and a pioneer in the field of quantum computing. He was the first person to propose how a quantum computer could be built, a task that is now proceeding apace in research labs around the world.

Over the last half-century, the computational power available to us has roughly doubled every 18 months, a fact first articulated by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore and formally known as Moore's Law. But, we are approaching the limits of what silicon can do, and it is clear that if we are to keep up the blinding pace of computational enhancement a new technology is needed. Many scientists that are hoping that quantum mechanics holds the key and that quantum computers will take us as far past semiconductors as semiconductors took us from pebbles. Lloyd and his colleagues are leading that charge.

...Lloyd sees the history of the universe as a series of information-processing revolutions. The first was the Big Bang, which brought into being from nothingness the cosmic seed of space and time...

The Big Bang was also a Bit Bang, he cutely surmises. Soon the primal bits were coalescing on the structures we know (protons, electrons, and so on), which later congregated to form atoms, which in turn clumped together to make stars and galaxies. ëEvery time a new ingredient of the soup condensed out ... new information was written in the cosmic cookbook.'

Planetary systems formed and more complicated molecules came into being, including eventually the life-encoding information structure known as DNA...

Life, language, human beings, society, culture, - all owe their existence to the intrinsic ability of matter and energy to process information, "Lloyd writes."

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