Calculating A Theoretical Boundary To Computation

TMB writes "Lawrence Krauss and Glenn Starkman, astrophysicists at Case Western Reserve University (and in LK's case, author of a number of books including Physics of Star Trek), just submitted this nice little paper to Phys. Rev. Letters. It claims that in an accelerating universe, the existence of a future event horizon puts a fundamental physical limit on the total amount of calculation that can be done, even in an infinite time. This limit is much smaller than the traditional Hawking-Beckenstein entropy. Among other things, this implies that and Moore's Law must have a finite lifetime, here calculated to be 600 years, and that consciousness must be finite."

Comments

Re:Sweet

[DrLudicrous]

2000? Who were your buddies? I graduated in 2000, so maybe I knew them.

Re:Sweet

[ThosLives]

Eargh, slashdot's no place to post names, is it? my spam-catch email is ftravela at eudoramail (com) (Lord knows how much spam already gets through cwru addresses!). Drop me a line and we can talk more - there's a slight chance we may have played cards before! (And if you happen to have been my roommate, fancy meeting you here!)

I'm A. Watson, by the way...