 Another feature that everybody notices about the universe is that it's complex. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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? |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Something else has happened with computers. |
| 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. |
| At some point, Moore's law will break down. |
| Science consists exactly of those forms of knowledge that can be verified and duplicated by anybody. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Thinking of the universe as a computer is controversial. |
| 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. |
