Seth Lloyd
Seth Lloyd
Seth Lloydis a professor of mechanical engineering and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He refers to himself as a "quantum mechanic"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
CountryUnited States of America
american-educator atoms build computers individual information massage normal quantum store
I build quantum computers that store information on individual atoms and then massage the normal interactions between the atoms to make them compute.
american-educator held promise science
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.
accessible american-educator form knowledge principle public science
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.
american-educator hope metaphor picture precise
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.
american-educator exact famous programs quantum
Similarly, another famous little quantum fluctuation that programs you is the exact configuration of your DNA.
american-educator building computers processes quantum since terms thinking
Since I've been building quantum computers I've come around to thinking about the world in terms of how it processes information.
american-educator available bit computers degree information neat quantum
The other neat thing about these quantum computers is that they're also storing a bit of information on every available degree of freedom.
simple starting-over able
Computers are famous for being able to do complicated things starting from simple programs.
sex fun integrity
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.
ongoing computer quantum
The history of the universe is, in effect, a huge and ongoing quantum computation. The universe is a quantum computer.
ignorance viruses spread
Bits of ignorance are like viruses that are copied and spread by interaction.
form
Science consists exactly of those forms of knowledge that can be verified and duplicated by anybody.
use flip energy
[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.
digital research performing
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?