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.- Seth Lloyd
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.
Thinking of the universe as a computer is controversial.
There are considerable advantages to using many degrees of freedom to store information, stability and controllability being perhaps the most important.
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.
Something else has happened with computers.
Similarly, another famous little quantum fluctuation that programs you is the exact configuration of your DNA.
Science consists exactly of those forms of knowledge that can be verified and duplicated by anybody.
One of the things that I have 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 is what sex is about; that is what history is about.
Of course, not everybody's willing to go out and do the experiments, but for the people who are willing to go out and do that, - if the experiments do not work, then it means it's not science.
Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics.
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.
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.
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.
