The Cosmic Code
Does the universe run on a simple computer program?
Yet at a deeper level Wolfram, Fredkin, and their acolytes may be on to something. In recent years many researchers have begun thinking of physical interactions as calculations and as flows of information, rather then mere encounters among bits of matter and quanta of radiation. Science writer Tom Siegfried, in a recent book, The Bit and the Pendulum, calls it the "new physics of information."
One physicist, Seth Lloyd at MIT, has estimated how many operations the universe would need to have performed so far were it a computer: a 10 followed by 120 zeroes. Lloyd also specializes in getting the very fabric of reality to act like a computer. He designs hyperadvanced quantum computers, in which single atoms or molecules serve as processors. "I talk to atoms and molecules in their own language, and if we ask them very nicely they will compute for us."
But although Lloyd believes the universe is in some sense a giant information processor, he cautions that it may be nothing like the computers we know. "The universe is what it is and it's been around a long time before we got here and it will be here a long time after we're gone, and it doesn't really care what we think it is."
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