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.
Seth LloydRead
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.
Interpretation
Computation is a fundamental aspect of all physical systems, shaped by our definitions of it.
Seth Lloyd's quote emphasizes that computation is not just confined to computers but is a concept that applies to all physical systems around us. The way we define and understand computation influences our perspectives on information processing in nature, suggesting a deeper connection between physical reality and computational theory.
In practice
In a lecture about the nature of computation and physics, one can use this quote to illustrate the interconnectedness of the two fields.
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.
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.
The history of the universe is, in effect, a huge and ongoing quantum computation. The universe is a quantum computer.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible.
Evolution has encountered no intellectual trouble; no new arguments have been offered. Creationism is a home-grown phenomenon of American sociocultural history-a splinter movement ... who believe that every word in the Bible must be literally true, whatever such a claim might mean.
That which is measured improves. That which is measured and reported improves exponentially.
I need scarcely say that the beginning and maintenance of life on earth is absolutely and infinitely beyond the range of all sound speculation in dynamical science. The only contribution of dynamics to theoretical biology is absolute negation of automatic commencement or automatic maintenance of life.
Every carbon atom in every living thing on the planet was produced in the heart of a dying star.
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