Slashdot Mirror
Is the Universe its own Largest Computer?
missingmatterboy writes: "If the universe is simply a giant calculating machine, how big is it? Seth Lloyd, who two years ago worked out the theoretical maximum possible power a laptop computer could posess, has now "estimated how much information the Universe can contain, and how many calculations it has performed since the Big Bang." His conclusion: you'd need about 10^90 bits, with something like 10^120 manipulations of those bits, to express the universe since time began."
One has to wonder who decided to mod that up. If the modee doesnt understand the post or even have a fucking clue about the stuff why mod it then... (you wont see me moderating business, economics or litigational stuff either)
Because that post is total crap. It's Planck and it's 10^-43 and Mandlebrot set is the converging set for a recursive complex equation (namely z z^2+c). Not that x=1/xi couldnt produce some fractal, but I'm not going to bother myself checking which that is because even this post is redundant, I'm posting this merely for the metamoderators.
Not to mention "guided by", "with chaotic consequences"...
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
I got the century wrong but yes, this was an idea. Here's a history site.
They were so overwhelmed by the idea that you could pump AIR instead of just water (and that it would invisibly kill things in bell jars), that they started wondering what else you could pump--e.g. thoughts. Here's Descartes playing with the idea:
"The cavities of the brain are central reservoirs...animal spirits enter these cavities. They pass into the pores of its substance and from these pores into the nerves. The nerves may be compared to the tubes of a waterworks; breathing or other actions depend on the flow of animal spirits into the nerves. The rational soul (the pineal) takes place of the engineer, living in that part of the reservoir that connects all of the various tubes...."