70 Quotes by Seth Lloyd

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.

By separating the function of adaptation from the function of maintaining the integrity of individual genes, sex allows much greater diversity while still keeping genes whole. Sex is not only fun, it is good engineering practice.

The primary consequence of the computational nature of the universe is that the universe naturally generates complex systems, such as life. Although the basic laws of physics are comparatively simple in form, they give rise, because they are computationally universal, to systems of enormous complexity.

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 don't work, then it means it's not science.

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

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.

One of the things that I've been doing recently in my scientific research is to ask this question: Is the universe actually capable of performing things like digital computations?

Thinking of the universe as a computer is controversial.

Computers are famous for being able to do complicated things starting from simple programs.