14 Seth Lloyd Quotes

Seth Lloyd quotes

1. Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.

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.'

1. 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.

2. [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.

3. 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.

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

5. 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.

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

7. 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.

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

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

10. 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.

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

12. 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.