Seth Lloyd quotes

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. (Seth Lloyd)
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. View quote
Seth Lloyd
Science consists exactly of those forms of knowledge that can be verified and duplicated by anybody. View quote
Seth Lloyd
Computers are famous for being able to do complicated things starting from simple programs. View quote
Seth Lloyd
For hundreds of millions of years, Sex was the most efficient method for propagating information of dubious provenance: the origins of all those snippets of junk DNA are lost in the sands of reproductive history. Move aside, Sex: the world-wide Web has usurped your role. View quote
Seth Lloyd
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. View quote
Seth Lloyd
Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. View quote
Seth Lloyd
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...If you can figure out how to take advantage of this quantum multitasking, we can build computers that can do computations that no classical computer could do even if it were the size of the entire universe. View quote
Seth Lloyd
Similarly, another famous little quantum fluctuation that programs you is the exact configuration of your DNA. View quote
Seth Lloyd
Thinking of the universe as a computer is controversial. View quote
Seth Lloyd
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. (Seth Lloyd)
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. View quote
Seth Lloyd
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. View quote
Seth Lloyd
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. View quote
Seth Lloyd
There are considerable advantages to using many degrees of freedom to store information, stability and controllability being perhaps the most important. View quote
Seth Lloyd
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. View quote
Seth Lloyd
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. View quote
Seth Lloyd
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. View quote
Seth Lloyd
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. View quote
Seth Lloyd
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. View quote
Seth Lloyd
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. (Seth Lloyd)
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? View quote
Seth Lloyd
At some point, Moore's law will break down. View quote
Seth Lloyd
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. View quote
Seth Lloyd
Another feature that everybody notices about the universe is that it's complex. View quote
Seth Lloyd