It’s Not Surprising That The Universe Is So Complex – It’s A Gigantic Quantum Computer

A. Sutherland  – MessageToEagle.com – Computer scientist Tomasso Toffoli once remarked that “we never perform a computation ourselves, we just hitch a ride on the great Computation that is going on already.”

“To him this is no cry of despair,” says Professor David Deutsch, a British physicist at the University of Oxford, “Quite the contrary. But critics of the computer-science-world-view do no want to see themselves as just someone else’s program running on someone else’s computer.”

For the past 50 years, scientists have theorized that the universe can be regarded as a giant quantum computer.

The physical universe does not seem to resemble the collection of wires, transistors, and electrical circuitry that make up a conventional digital computer.

So how then, can one claim that the universe that we see around us – is a computer?

The answer is yes, we can claim it, says Seth Lloyd-Professor of Quantum-Mechanical Engineering at MIT and originator of the first technologically feasible design for a working quantum computer.

This claim is strongly supported by the definition of computation, of which Turing was the primary developer.

Alan Turing (1912 – 1954), a British philosopher, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist, independently created the first abstract designs for universal computers.

According to Turing, a universal digital computer is a system that can be programmed to perform any desired sequence of logical operations.
Turing’s invention of the universal Turing machine makes this notion precise.

Is the universe capable of performing universal digital computation in the sense of Turing?

Can the universe or some part of it be programmed to simulate a universal Turing machine?

Can a universal Turing machine efficiently simulate the dynamics of the universe itself?

All interactions between particles in the universe, says Lloyd, convey not only energy but also information-in other words, particles not only collide, they compute.

And what is the entire universe computing, ultimately? “Its own dynamical evolution,” he says. “As the computation proceeds, reality unfolds.”

The quantum computational model of the universe explains a variety of observed but unexplained phenomena not encompassed by the ordinary laws of physics.

See also:

Our Universe Is A Gigantic And Wonderfully Detailed Holographic Illusion

Our Brain Is A Holographic Machine Existing In A Holographic Universe

How Many Realities Can Exist Inside The Holographic Universe?

More About The Holographic Universe
Particularly, it focuses on the co-existence in the universe of randomness and order, and of simplicity and complexity, according to Lloyd’s paper.

All current physical observations are consistent with the theory that the universe is indeed a quantum cellular automaton.

Does the fact that the universe is observationally indistinguishable from a giant quantum computer tell us anything new or interesting about its behavior? The answer to this question is a resounding ‘Yes!’

In particular, the quantum computational model of the universe answers a question that has plagued human beings ever since they first began to wonder about the origins of the universe, namely: Why is the universe so ordered and yet so complex?

This fascinating theory, Lloyd has also developed in his book “Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos“. He gives an extraordinary explanation what exactly led him to this remarkable conclusion.

Simultaneously, he sheds light on extremely complex questions:

How much information is there in the universe? What information existed at the moment of the Big Bang and what happened to it? How do quantum mechanics and chaos theory interact to create our world? Could we attempt to re-create it on a giant quantum computer?

Written by A. Sutherland – MessageToEagle.com Senior Staff Writer

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