Seth Lloyd Quotes

#1. [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.

Seth Lloyd

#2. 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

#3. Some folks think life and technology and mind can keep expanding forever. Others say it can't. We are still not clear on that.

Seth Lloyd

#4. 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

#5. 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.

Seth Lloyd

#6. Another feature that everybody notices about the universe is that it's complex.

Seth Lloyd

#7. Something else has happened with computers.

Seth Lloyd

#8. 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.

Seth Lloyd

#9. Meaning is like pornography, you know it when you see it.

Seth Lloyd

#10. At some point, Moore's law will break down.

Seth Lloyd

#11. 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.

Seth Lloyd

#12. 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.

Seth Lloyd

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

Seth Lloyd

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

Seth Lloyd

#15. The significance of a bit depends not just on its value but on how that value affects other bits over time, as part of the continued information processing that makes up the dynamical evolution of the universe.

Seth Lloyd

#16. 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.

Seth Lloyd

#17. 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.

Seth Lloyd

#18. The history of the universe is, in effect, a huge and ongoing quantum computation. The universe is a quantum computer.

Seth Lloyd

#19. 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.

Seth Lloyd

#20. 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.

Seth Lloyd

#21. 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?

Seth Lloyd

#22. 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.

Seth Lloyd

#23. Yes, I am a quantum mechanic! Those darn quantum computers break all the time.

Seth Lloyd

#24. 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.

Seth Lloyd

#25. Thinking of the universe as a computer is controversial.

Seth Lloyd

#26. 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.

Seth Lloyd

#27. 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.

Seth Lloyd

#28. A classical computation is like a solo voice - one line of pure tones succeeding each other. A quantum computation is like a symphony - many lines of tones interfering with one another.

Seth Lloyd

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

Seth Lloyd

#30. 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.

Seth Lloyd

#31. 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

#32. 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.

Seth Lloyd

#33. 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.

Seth Lloyd

#34. 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.

Seth Lloyd

#35. 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.

Seth Lloyd

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

Seth Lloyd

#37. 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.

Seth Lloyd

#38. 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.

Seth Lloyd

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

Seth Lloyd

#40. 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.

Seth Lloyd

#41. When it comes to their capacity to screw things up, computers are becoming more human every day.

Seth Lloyd

#42. Bits of ignorance are like viruses that are copied and spread by interaction.

Seth Lloyd