The universe is a quantum computer. Seth Lloyd WHAT is the universe made of? Matter or energy? Particles or strings? According to physicist Vlatko Vedral's appealing new book, it is made, at bottom, of information. In other words, if you break the universe into smaller and smaller pieces, the smallest pieces are, in fact, bits. With this theme in mind, Vedral embarks on an exuberant romp through physics, biology, philosophy, religion and even personal finance. Any system that has two distinct states can act as a bit - even an individual elementary particle: "electron over here" represents zero, "electron over there" represents one.
At this smallest of scales, however, the universe is governed by the famously weird laws of quantum mechanics. Over the last two decades, a flourishing field of quantum information and computation has generated a wealth of experimental and theoretical tests of information processing at the quantum scale. Edge. Carl Sagan. Blog. Ray Kurzweil on how technology will transform us. NASA. SpaceX. Scaled Composites. Virgin Galactic. Richard Dawkins: Growing up in the universe.