Seth Lloyd 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... Read More

Photo © John Brockman

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,”... Read more