Seth Lloyd

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Seth Lloyd is a Professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. He refers to himself as a "quantum mechanic".

Lloyd was born on August 2, 1960, received his AB from Harvard College in 1982, his Math.Cert. and M.Phil. from Cambridge University in 1983 and 1984, and his Ph.D. from Rockefeller University in 1988 (advisor Heinz Pagels) for a thesis entitled "Black Holes, Demons, and the Loss of Coherence: How complex systems get information, and what they do with it." After postdoctoral fellowships at the California Institute of Technology and Los Alamos National Laboratory, he joined MIT in 1994.

His research area is the interplay of information with complex systems, especially quantum systems. He has made contributions to the field of quantum computation and proposed a design for a quantum computer.

In his book, Programming the Universe, Lloyd contends that the universe itself is one big quantum computer producing what we see around us, and ourselves, as it runs a cosmic program. According to Lloyd, once we understand the laws of physics completely, we will be able to use small-scale quantum computing to understand the universe completely as well.

Lloyd states that we could have the whole universe simulated in a computer in 600 years provided that computational power increases according to Moore's Law. However, Lloyd shows that there are limits to rapid exponential growth in a finite universe, and that it is very unlikely that Moore's Law will be maintained indefinitely.