[extropy-chat] FWD (SK) Welcome to the Machine

[Terry W. Colvin]

April 2, 2006

'Programming the Universe,' by Seth Lloyd [book review]
Welcome to the Machine
Review by COREY S. POWELL

Seth Lloyd certainly gives his readers a lot of 
bang for their buck. In the space of 221 dense, 
frequently thrilling and occasionally 
exasperating pages, he tackles computer logic, 
thermodynamics, chaos theory, complexity, quantum 
mechanics, cosmology, consciousness, sex and the 
origin of life — throwing in, for good measure, a 
heartbreaking afterword that repaints the 
significance of all that has come before.

The source of all this intellectual mayhem is the 
kind of Big Idea so prevalent in popular science 
books these days. Lloyd, a professor of 
mechanical engineering at M.I.T., takes as his 
topic the fundamental workings of the universe, 
which he thinks has been horribly misunderstood. 
Scientists have looked at it as a ragtag 
collection of particles and fields while failing 
to see what it is as a majestic whole: an 
enormous computer. Every physical event, 
everywhere, feeds information into it. And the 
output of the cosmic computer is nothing less than reality itself.

This all has a faddish, Matrix-like ring to it, 
but Lloyd's argument is rooted in ideas 
stretching back at least to the mid-19th century. 
At the time, the prevailing scientific philosophy 
held that the universe operates like a clockwork: 
the movement of each piece determines the 
movement of every other piece, and plugging the 
right numbers into the right equations could in 
principle predict the future of the cosmos with 
unlimited precision. Several prominent 
researchers recognized problems with that model, 
however. Any piece of machinery should operate 
backward as well as forward, but the real world 
clearly doesn't work that way. Candles don't 
unburn, the sun doesn't unshine and people never 
grow younger. Something keeps events moving 
irrevocably forward, toward a state of ever-greater disorder and complexity.

The German physicist Rudolf Clausius made the 
first stirrings toward Lloyd's information-based 
worldview in 1865, when he described that 
tendency toward disorder with a term he called 
entropy. Entropy is one of those words that 
almost everyone has heard and almost nobody can 
really explain. By my count, Lloyd defines it 21 
times. Some of the attempts are quite 
entertaining (one involves his efforts to bond 
with his British classmates over a game of 
snooker) but none is entirely persuasive. If you 
want to follow Lloyd down his rabbit hole, 
however, this is the pill you have to swallow.

Broadly speaking, entropy is the amount of 
disorder and information in a system. Take, for 
example, a fresh, unshuffled deck of cards. In 
that state it has low entropy and contains little 
information. Just two pieces of data (the 
hierarchy of suits and the relative ranks of the 
cards) tell you where to find every card in the 
deck without looking. Give it a good shuffle and 
look again. The deck has a lot of entropy and a 
lot of information. If you want to locate a 
particular card, you have to hunt through the 
entire deck. There is only one perfectly ordered 
state but about 1068 disordered ones, which is 
why you will never, ever accidentally shuffle the 
deck back into its original order.

Amazingly, this process of generating entropy is 
universal. It is what happens when a candle 
burns, when the sun shines and when your stomach 
digests your lunch. In every instance, there is 
an inexorable, irreversible trend toward disorder 
and an increase in the total amount of 
information in the world. Lloyd traces this 
growth in data all the way down to the subatomic 
scale. Just as the shuffling of cards increases 
the entropy of the deck, the bumping and jostling 
of particles and atoms and molecules increases 
entropy in the world around us, with each 
interaction acting to exchange or create 
information. Lloyd then goes a step farther, 
making the case that such an exchange is 
equivalent to the flow of data in a computer — 
but only the right kind of computer.

Ordinary desktop computers are a flawed model of 
the physical world, Lloyd argues, because they 
handle everything as clear "yes" or "no" 
commands, while the universe operates according 
to the rules of quantum physics, which inherently 
produce fuzzy results. But Lloyd happens to be 
one of the world's experts in a new kind of 
computing device, called a quantum computer, 
which can produce similarly vague answers like 
"mostly yes but also a little bit no." Such 
computers — a handful of labs have built 
rudimentary prototypes — mimic the natural world 
perfectly, Lloyd claims: the two systems are not 
just similar, they are the same. The universe is 
a quantum computer whose computations are the 
movements of information that define the world we experience.

These discussions of quantum uncertainty and 
computer logic are true mind-benders and yet, 
oddly, they are not nearly so confusing as the 
section on entropy. Ideas as huge, and hugely 
weird, as the computational universe draw out 
Lloyd's visionary side, and he does a commendable 
job of weaving in jokes and personal anecdotes to 
leaven the undeniably heavy material. He is 
consistently charming and fun. He just isn't always entirely convincing.

More than once, I found myself recalling a scene 
in "Animal House" in which one of the Delta House 
guys has a cosmic epiphany during a 
cannabis-fueled conversation with his professor 
(Larry: "That means that one tiny atom in my 
fingernail could be. . . ." Professor: ". . . 
could be one little, tiny universe." Pause. 
Larry: "Could I buy some pot from you?") Is Lloyd 
doing anything more than playing physics head 
games? He anticipates the question, asking, "Just 
what does this picture of the universe as a 
quantum computer buy me that I didn't already 
have" thanks to our "perfectly good 
quantum-mechanical theory of elementary 
particles?" For one thing, he answers, it could 
be a powerful new research tool. One of Lloyd's 
M.I.T. colleagues, David Cory, has used a simple 
quantum computer to study how information flows 
through the subatomic world. If these devices 
truly match the workings of the universe, 
expanded versions could be used, for example, to 
develop a more complete theory of gravity, whose 
essence is still utterly mysterious.

On a deeper level, Lloyd thinks he has found a 
new way to explain one of the most basic 
questions in science: Why is the world so 
complex? If the universe began in a formless Big 
Bang, how did it develop into a place with stars, 
planets and people? His answer returns to the 
idea that information always begets more 
information. In a quantum-computer universe, new 
information and new complexity are being born all 
the time. Indeed, Lloyd's universe is hard-wired 
for complexity. The eventual emergence of DNA, 
sex and consciousness is practically inevitable.

It's a fascinating and profoundly comforting 
idea, but it lies on the far side of empirical 
science. For now, a more telling test is how well 
it works as a metaphysics, a way of understanding 
the universe and our place in it. That test comes 
in a startlingly dark passage at the very end of 
"Programming the Universe," where Lloyd addresses 
the death of the brilliant physicist Heinz 
Pagels, one of his mentors. The two men were 
mountain climbing in Colorado in 1988 when Pagels 
missed a step and took a fatal fall into a gully. 
Lloyd stood above, utterly helpless.

The pain is still fresh as Lloyd recounts the 
episode, and his effort at finding solace in 
information, not in religion, is touching. "We 
have not entirely lost him," he writes. "While he 
lived, Heinz programmed his own piece of the 
universe. The resulting computation unfolds in us 
and around us." That elegy reveals a central but 
previously hidden aspect of Lloyd's theorizing: 
information as thread that binds past and future 
so that nothing is ever truly gone — not a great 
idea, not a great man, not even love itself.

Corey S. Powell is a senior editor at Discover magazine.

http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?emc=tnt&tntget=2006/04/02/books/review/02powell.html&tntemail1=y




-- 
"Only a zit on the wart on the heinie of progress." Copyright 1992, Frank Rice


Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
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