Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos. Seth Lloyd. xii + 221 pp. Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. $25.95.
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.
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