Quotes from Seth Lloyd

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

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

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

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, 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Moore's law is a law not of nature, but of human ingenuity.

Our classical intuition tells us that analog computation is intrinsically continuous and digital computation is intrinsically discrete. As with many other classical intuitions, this one is incorrect when applied to quantum computation. Analog quantum computers and digital quantum computers are one and the same device.

The computational universe is not an alternative to the physical universe. The universe that evolves by processing information and the universe that evolves by the laws of physics are one and the same. The two descriptions, computational and physical, are complementary ways of capturing the same phenomena.

philosopher Archie Bahm: "Nature can never be completely described, for such a description of nature would have to duplicate nature." That is, a perfect description of the universe is indistinguishable from the universe itself.

Like all languages, Atom is easier to learn when you're younger. With Paul Penfield, I co-teach a freshman course at MIT called Information and Entropy. The goal of this course, like the goal of this book, is to reveal the fundamental role that information plays in the universe.

Quantum fluctuations are the monkeys that program the universe.

Computers certainly possess the ability to reason and the capacity for self-reference. And just because they do, their actions are intrinsically inscrutable. Consequently, as they become more powerful and perform a more varied set of tasks, computers exhibit an unpredictability approaching that of human beings. Indeed, by Averroës's standards, they possess the same degree of immortality as humans.

As mentioned before, quantum mechanics guarantees that any physical system with finite energy confined to a finite volume of space has a finite number of distinguishable states and therefore will register a finite number of bits.

Ultimately, information and energy play complementary roles in the universe: Energy makes physical systems do things. Information tells them what to do.

Entropy is the information contained in a physical system that is invisible to us.

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.