Seth Lloyd Quotes
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Bits of ignorance are like viruses that are copied and spread by interaction.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes, and the second law of thermodynamics.
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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.
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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.
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When it comes to their capacity to screw things up, computers are becoming more human every day.
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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.
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Science consists exactly of those forms of knowledge that can be verified and duplicated by anybody.
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Meaning is like pornography, you know it when you see it.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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By separating the function of adaptation from the function of maintaining the integrity of individual genes, sex allows much greater diversity while still keeping genes whole. Sex is not only fun, it is good engineering practice.
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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.
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The history of the universe is, in effect, a huge and ongoing quantum computation. The universe is a quantum computer.
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Some folks think life and technology and mind can keep expanding forever. Others say it can't. We are still not clear on that.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 themselves, as a species, can process.