Seth Lloyd

Thinking of the universe as a computer is controversial.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.