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In the 1940s, computer pioneer Konrad Zuse began to speculate that the universe might be nothing but a giant computer continually executing formal rules to compute its own evolution. He published the first paper on this radical idea in 1967, and since then it has provoked an ever-increasing response from popular culture (the film The Matrix, for example, owes a great deal to Zuse's theories) and hard science alike...
Does a deterministic universe worry you or enrich you? Are we all computations? Are the problems of free-will, self reflexion (consciousness) and entropy eleviated or constricted by this model?
...the universe can be viewed as a giant quantum computer made up of connected quantum gates that flip quantum bits and thereby propagate information and uncertainty in an "infectious" way. [In his new book Seth] Lloyd uses results by Hans Joachim Bremermann, Norman Margolus and Lev Levitin to calculate the processing power of the "ultimate laptop" (one with 1 kilogram of mass and 1 liter of volume): a maximum of 1051 operations per second on 1032 bits. A good fan would be needed, though: The massively parallel laptop would be roughly 100 times hotter than the center of the Sun. Lloyd also calculates that the visible universe has so far computed about 10122 operations on 1092 bits. Doesn't sound like a lot, does it?
Like most quantum physicists, Lloyd believes that there is a source of true randomness, which manifests itself whenever we measure a quantum bit. He does not explicitly mention, however, that this belief has never been experimentally proved. Neither Heisenberg's uncertainty principle nor Bell's inequality (which rests on the very assumption of randomness) excludes the possibility that the universe (including all observers inhabiting it) is in principle computable by a deterministic computer, as first suggested by Zuse.
In fact, Lloyd's belief in true randomness also seems inconsistent with his invocation of Ockham's razor, which favors simple explanations of the universe's history over complex ones. According to both standard and algorithmic information theory, true randomness actually corresponds to maximal information, complexity and description length—the opposite of simplicity.
As long as the (currently somewhat unfashionable) hypothesis of determinism remains unfalsified, many scientists will be dissatisfied by an explanation of our universe's history that requires an enormous amount of information to describe all the random events that have taken place, in addition to the known, compactly describable physical laws. Physicists should keep searching for simple, deterministic, pseudorandom computational rules explaining any type of hitherto-unexplained apparent randomness. Einstein, whose belief that "God does not play dice" has not yet been proved wrong, would probably agree.
- Extract from review of Programming the Universe by Seth Lloyd
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