{"product_id":"programming-the-universe-isbn-9781400033867","title":"Programming the Universe","description":"Is the universe actually a giant quantum computer? According to Seth Lloyd, the answer is yes. All interactions between particles in the universe, Lloyd explains, convey not only energy but also information–in other words, particles not only collide, they compute. What is the entire universe computing, ultimately? “Its own dynamical evolution,” he says. “As the computation proceeds, reality unfolds.” \u003ci\u003eProgramming the Universe\u003c\/i\u003e, a wonderfully accessible book, presents an original and compelling vision of reality, revealing our world in an entirely new light.“Lloyd is one of the gurus of quantum and information theory, and in this accessible book he presents an insightful new perspective on the cosmos.”—Sir Martin Rees, University of Cambridge“What an astonishing book! Lloyd is at the forefront of a revolution.”  —Kevin Kelly, Editor-at-Large, \u003ci\u003eWired\u003c\/i\u003e“Lloyd thinks he has found a new way to explain one of the most basic questions in science: Why is the world so complex? . . . Fascinating and profoundly comforting. . . .  Seth Lloyd certainly gives his readers a lot of bang for their buck.”—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\"Renowned for his innovative conflation of pure physics and computation, Lloyd is well positioned to hack his way into space-time and come back with answers.\"  —\u003ci\u003eSeed\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eSeth Lloyd\u003c\/b\u003e is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and a principal investigator at the Research Laboratory of Electronics. He is also adjunct assistant professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He designed the first feasible quantum computer, and works on problems having to do with information and complex systems from the very small (how do atoms process information? how can you make them compute?) to the very large (how does society process information? And how can we understand society in terms of its ability to process information?).  His seminal work in the fields of quantum computation and quantum communications--including proposing the first technologically feasible design for a quantum computer--has gained him a reputation as an innovator and leader in the field of quantum computing. Lloyd has been featured widely in the mainstream media including the front page of \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Economist\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eWired\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Dallas Morning News\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Times\u003c\/i\u003e (London), among others. His name also frequently appears (both as writer and subject) in the pages of \u003ci\u003eNature\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eNew Scientist\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eScience\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eScientific American\u003c\/i\u003e.This book is the story of the universe and the bit. The universe is the   biggest thing there is and the bit is the smallest possible chunk of   information. The universe is made of bits. Every molecule, atom, and   elementary particle registers bits of information. Every interaction   between those pieces of the universe processes that information by   altering those bits. That is, the universe computes, and because the   universe is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, it computes in   an intrinsically quantum-mechanical fashion; its bits are quantum bits.   The history of the universe is, in effect, a huge and ongoing quantum   computation. The universe is a quantum computer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This begs the question: What does the universe compute? It computes   itself. The universe computes its own behavior. As soon as the universe   began, it began computing. At first, the patterns it produced were   simple, comprising elementary particles and establishing the   fundamental laws of physics. In time, as it processed more and more   information, the universe spun out ever more intricate and complex   patterns, including galaxies, stars, and planets. Life, language, human   beings, society, culture-all owe their existence to the intrinsic   ability of matter and energy to process information. The computational   capability of the universe explains one of the great mysteries of   nature: how complex systems such as living creatures can arise from   fundamentally simple physical laws. These laws allow us to predict the   future, but only as a matter of probability, and only on a large scale.   The quantum-computational nature of the universe dictates that the   details of the future are intrinsically unpredictable. They can be   computed only by a computer the size of the universe itself. Otherwise,   the only way to discover the future is to wait and see what happens.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Allow me to introduce myself. The first thing I remember is living in a   chicken house. My father was apprenticed to a furniture maker in   Lincoln, Massachusetts, and the chicken house was in back of her barn.   My father turned the place into a two-room apartment; the space where   the chickens had roosted became bunks for my older brother and me. (My   younger brother was allowed a cradle.) At night, my mother would sing   to us, tuck us in, and close the wooden doors to the roosts, leaving us   to lie snug and stare out the windows at the world outside.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My first memory is of seeing a fire leap up in a wire trash basket with   an overlapping diamond pattern. Then I remember holding tight to my   mother's blue-jeaned leg just above the knee and my father flying a   Japanese fighter kite. After that, memories crowd on thick and fast.   Each living being's perception of the world is unique and crowded with   detail and structure. Yet we all inhabit the same space and are   governed by the same physical laws. In school, I learned that the   physical laws governing the universe are surprisingly simple. How could   it be, I wondered, that the intricacy and complexity I saw outside my   bedroom window was the result of these simple physical laws? I decided   to study this question and spent years learning about the laws of   nature.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Heinz Pagels, who died tragically in a mountaineering accident in   Colorado in the summer of 1988, was a brilliant and unconventional   thinker who believed in transgressing the conventional boundaries of   science. He encouraged me to develop physically precise techniques for   characterizing and measuring complexity. Later, under the guidance of   Murray Gell-Mann at Caltech, I learned how the laws of quantum   mechanics and elementary-particle physics effectively \"program\" the   universe, planting the seeds of complexity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    These days, I am a professor of mechanical engineering at the   Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Or, because I have no formal   training in mechanical engineering, it might be more accurate to call   me a professor of quantum-mechanical engineering. Quantum mechanics is   the branch of physics that deals with matter and energy at its smallest   scales. Quantum mechanics is to atoms what classical mechanics is to   engines. In essence: I engineer atoms.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In 1993, I discovered a way to build a quantum computer. Quantum   computers are devices that harness the information-processing ability   of individual atoms, photons, and other elementary particles. They   compute in ways that classical computers, such as a Macintosh or a PC,   cannot. In the process of learning how to make atoms and molecules-the   smallest pieces of the universe-compute, I grew to appreciate the   intrinsic information-processing ability of the universe as a whole.   The complex world we see around us is the manifestation of the   universe's underlying quantum computation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The digital revolution under way today is merely the latest in a long   line of information-processing revolutions stretching back through the   development of language, the evolution of sex, and the creation of   life, to the beginning of the universe itself. Each revolution has laid   the groundwork for the next, and all information-processing revolutions   since the Big Bang stem from the intrinsic information-processing   ability of the universe. The computational universe necessarily   generates complexity. Life, sex, the brain, and human civilization did   not come about by mere accident.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e    The Quantum Computer\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Quantum mechanics is famously weird. Waves act like particles, and   particles act like waves. Things can be in two places at once. It is   perhaps not surprising that, at small scales, things behave in strange   and counterintuitive ways; after all, our intuitions have developed for   dealing with objects much larger than individual atoms. Quantum   weirdness is still disconcerting, though. Niels Bohr, the father of   quantum mechanics, once said that anyone who thinks he can contemplate   quantum mechanics without getting dizzy hasn't properly understood it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Quantum computers exploit \"quantum weirdness\" to perform tasks too   complex for classical computers. Because a quantum bit, or \"qubit,\" can   register both 0 and 1 at the same time (a classical bit can register   only one or the other), a quantum computer can perform millions of   computations simultaneously.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Quantum computers process the information stored on individual atoms,   electrons, and photons. A quantum computer is a democracy of   information: every atom, electron, and photon participates equally in   registering and processing information. And this fundamental democracy   of information is not confined to quantum computers. All physical   systems are at bottom quantum-mechanical, and all physical systems   register and process information. The world is composed of elementary   particles-electrons, photons, quarks-and each elementary piece of a   physical system registers a chunk of information: one particle, one   bit. When these pieces interact, they transform and process that   information, bit by bit. Each collision between elementary particles   acts as a simple logical operation, or \"op.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    To understand any physical system in terms of its bits, we need to   understand in detail the mechanism by which each and every piece of   that system registers and processes information. If we can understand   how a quantum computer does this, then we can understand how a physical   system does.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The idea of such a computer was proposed in the early 1980s by Paul   Benioff, Richard Feynman, David Deutsch, and others. When they were   first discussed, quantum computers were a wholly abstract concept:   Nobody had a clue how to build them. In the early 1990s, I showed how   they could be built using existing experimental techniques. Over the   past ten years, I have worked with some of the world's greatest   scientists and engineers to design, build, and operate quantum   computers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    There are a number of good reasons to build quantum computers. The   first is that we can. Quantum technologies-technologies for   manipulating matter at the atomic scale-have undergone remarkable   advances in recent years. We now possess lasers stable enough,   fabrication techniques accurate enough, and electronics fast enough to   perform computation at the atomic scale.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The second reason is that we have to-at least if we want to keep   building ever faster and more powerful computers. Over the past half   century, the power of computers has doubled every year and a half. This   explosion of computer power is known as \"Moore's law,\" after Gordon   Moore, subsequently the chief executive of Intel, who noted its   exponential advance in the 1960s. Moore's law is a law not of nature,   but of human ingenuity. Computers have gotten two times faster every   eighteen months because every eighteen months engineers have figured   out how to halve the size of the wires and logic gates from which they   are constructed. Every time the size of the basic components of a   computer goes down by a factor of two, twice as many of them will fit   on the same size chip. The resulting computer is twice as powerful as   its predecessor of a year and half earlier.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    If you project Moore's law into the future, you find that the size of   the wires and logic gates from which computers are constructed should   reach the atomic scale in about forty years; thus, if Moore's law is to   be sustained, we must learn to build computers that operate at the   quantum scale. Quantum computers represent the ultimate level of   miniaturization.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The quantum computers my colleagues and I have constructed already   attain this goal: each atom registers a bit. But the quantum computers   we can build today are small, not only in size but also in power. The   largest general-purpose quantum computers available at the time of this   writing have seven to ten quantum bits and can perform thousands of   quantum logic operations per second. (By contrast, a conventional   desktop computer can register trillions of bits and can perform   billions of conventional, classical logic operations per second.) We're   already good at making computers with atomic-scale components; we're   just not good at making big computers with atomic-scale components.   Since the first quantum computers were constructed a decade ago,   however, the number of bits they register has doubled almost every two   years. Even if this exponential rate of progress can be sustained, it   will still take forty years before quantum computers can match the   number of bits registered by today's classical computers. Quantum   computers are a long way from the desktop.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The third reason to build quantum computers is that they allow us to   understand the way in which the universe registers and processes   information. One of the best ways to understand a law of nature is to   build and operate a machine that illustrates that law. Often, we build   the machine first and the law comes later. The wheel and the top had   existed for millennia before the establishment of the law of   conservation of angular momentum. The thrown rock preceded Galileo's   laws of motion; the prism and the telescope came before Newton's   optics; the steam engine preceded James Watt's governor and Sadi   Carnot's second law of thermodynamics. Since quantum mechanics is so   hard to grasp, wouldn't it be nice to build a machine that embodies the   laws of quantum mechanics? By playing with that machine, one could   acquire a working understanding of quantum mechanics, just as a baby   who plays with a top grasps the principles of angular momentum embodied   by the toy. Without direct experience of how atoms actually behave, our   understanding remains shallow. The \"toy\" quantum computers we build   today are machines that will allow us to learn more and more about how   physical systems register and process information at the   quantum-mechanical level.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The final reason to build quantum computers is that it's fun. In the   pages to come, you'll meet some of the world's foremost scientists and   engineers: Jeff Kimble of Caltech, constructor of the world's first   photonic quantum logic gate; Dave Wineland of the National Institute of   Standards and Technology, who built the first simple quantum computer;   Hans Mooij of the Delft University of Technology, whose group gave some   of the earliest demonstrations of quantum bits in superconducting   circuits; David Cory of MIT, who built the first molecular quantum   computer, and whose quantum analog computers can perform computations   that would require a classical computer larger than the universe   itself. Once we have seen how quantum computers work, we will be able   to put bounds on the computational capacity of the universe.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Language of Nature\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    As it computes, the universe effortlessly spins out intricate and   complex structures. To understand how the universe computes-and thus to   understand better those complex structures-we must learn how it   registers and processes information. That is, we must learn the   underlying language of nature.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Think of me as a kind of atomic masseur. As a professor of   quantum-mechanical engineering at MIT, my job is to massage electrons,   photons, atoms, and molecules into those special states in which they   become quantum computers and quantum communication systems. Atoms are   tiny but strong, resilient but sensitive. They are easy to talk to   (just hit the table and you've talked to billions upon billions of   them) but hard to listen to (I bet you can't tell me what the table had   to say beyond \"thump\"). They don't care about you, and they go about   their business doing what they have always done. But if you massage   them in just the right way, you can charm them. They will compute for   you.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Atoms are not alone in their ability to process information. Photons   (particles of light), phonons (particles of sound), quantum dots   (artificial atoms), superconducting circuits-all these microscopic   systems can register information. And if you speak their language and   ask them nicely, they will process that information for you. What   language do such systems speak? Like all physical systems, they respond   to energy, force, and momentum, to light and sound, to electricity and   gravity. Physical systems speak a language whose grammar consists of   the laws of physics. Over the last ten years, we have learned this   language well enough to talk to atoms-to convince them to perform   computations and report the results.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    How hard is it to \"speak Atom\"? To learn to converse fluently takes a   lifetime. I myself am a poor atomic conversationalist, compared with   other scientists and quantum-mechanical engineers you will meet in this   book. To learn enough to carry on a simple conversation, however, is   not hard.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Like all languages, Atom is easier to learn when you're younger. With   Paul Penfield, I co-teach a freshman course at MIT called Information   and Entropy. The goal of this course, like the goal of this book, is to   reveal the fundamental role that information plays in the universe.   Fifty years ago, MIT freshmen used to arrive full of knowledge about   internal-combustion engines, gears and levers, drivetrains and pulleys.   Twenty-five years ago, they arrived full of knowledge of vacuum tubes,   transistors, ham radios, and electronic circuits. Now they arrive   chock-a-block full of knowledge about computers, disk drives, fiber   optics, bandwidth, and music- and image-compression codes. Their   predecessors lived in worlds dominated by mechanical and electrical   technologies; today's freshmen come from a world dominated by   information. Their predecessors already knew lots about force and   energy, voltage and charge; today's freshmen already know lots about   bits and bytes. The freshmen in our course already know so much about   information technology that we can teach them subjects-including   quantum computation-that previously could be taught only to graduate   students. (My senior colleagues in the Mechanical Engineering   Department complain that the incoming freshmen have never used a   screwdriver. This is untrue. Fully half of them have used a screwdriver   to install more memory in their computers.)","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300248211685,"sku":"NP9781400033867","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400033867.jpg?v=1767735156","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/programming-the-universe-isbn-9781400033867","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}