Something else has happened with computers.

Similarly, another famous little quantum fluctuation that programs you is the exact configuration of your DNA.

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.

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.

The other neat thing about these quantum computers is that they’re also storing a bit of information on every available degree of freedom.

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...

This democratization of science, this making it public, is in a sense the realization of a promise that science has held for a long time.

Thinking of the universe as a computer is controversial.

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.

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...

We have a picture for how complexity arises, because if the universe is computationally capable, maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised that things are so entirely out of control.

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.

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

Merely by existing and evolving in time – by existing – any physical system registers information, and by evolving in time it transforms or processes that information.

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...

In this metaphor we actually have a picture of the computational universe, a metaphor which I hope to make scientifically precise as part of a research program.

Every physical system registers information, and just by evolving in time, by doing its thing, it changes that information, transforms that information, or, if you like, processes that information.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

Another feature that everybody notices about the universe is that it’s complex.

People are becoming more and more interested in science, and that’s because they realize that science impacts their daily lives in important ways.

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.

Clearly, packaging issues alone make it unlikely that this limit can be obtained, even setting aside the difficulties of stability and control.

Since I’ve been building quantum computers I’ve come around to thinking about the world in terms of how it processes information.

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?

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

So science is basically, at it most fundamental level, a public form of knowledge, a form of knowledge that is in principle accessible to everybody.

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

I build quantum computers that store information on individual atoms and then massage the normal interactions between the atoms to make them compute.