SETH LLOYD: I'm a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. I build quantum computers that store information on individual atoms and then massage the normal interactions between the atoms to make them compute. Rather than having the atoms do what they normally do, you make them do elementary logical operations like bit flips, not operations, and-gates, and or-gates. This allows you to process information not only on a small scale, but in ways that are not possible using ordinary computers. In order to figure out how to make atoms compute, you have to learn how to speak their language and to understand how they process information under normal circumstances.

It's been known for more than a hundred years, ever since Maxwell, that all physical systems register and process information. For instance, this little inchworm right here has something on the order of Avogadro's number of atoms. And dividing by Boltzmann's concept, its entropy is on the order of Avogadro's number of bits. This means that it would take about Avogadro's number of bits to describe that little guy and how every atom and molecule is jiggling around in his body in full detail. Every physical system registers information, and just by evolving in time, by doing its thing, it changes that information, transforms that information, or, if you like, processes that information. Since I've been building quantum computers I've come around to thinking about the world in terms of how it processes information.

A few years ago I wrote a paper in Nature called "Fundamental Physical Limits to Computation," in which I showed that you could rate the information processing power of physical systems. Say that you're building a computer out of some collection of atoms. How many logical operations per second could you perform? Also, how much information could these systems register? Using relatively straightforward techniques you can show, for instance, that the number of elementary logical operations per second that you can perform with that amount of energy, E, is just E/H - well, it's 2E divided by pi times h-bar. [h-bar is essentially 10[-34] (10 to the -34) Joule-seconds, meaning that you can perform 10[-50] (10 to the 50) ops per second.)]If you have a kilogram of matter, which has mc2 — or around 10[17] Joules (10 to the 17) Joules — worth of energy and you ask how many ops per second it could perform, it could perform 10[17] (ten to the 17) Joules / h-bar. It would be really spanking if you could have a kilogram of matter — about what a laptop computer weighs — that could process at this rate. Using all the conventional techniques that were developed by Maxwell, Boltzmann, and Gibbs, and then developed by von Neumann and others back at the early part of the 20th century for counting numbers of states, you can count how many bits it could register. What you find is that if you were to turn the thing into a nuclear fireball — which is essentially turning it all into radiation, probably the best way of having as many bits as possible — then you could register about 10[30] (10 to the 30) bits. Actually that's many more bits than you could register if you just stored a bit on every atom, because Avogadro's number of atoms store about 10[24] (10 to the 24) bits.

Having done this paper to calculate the capacity of the ultimate laptop, and also to raise some speculations about the role of information-processing in, for example, things like black holes, I thought that this was actually too modest a venture, and that it would be worthwhile to calculate how much information you could process if you were to use all the energy and matter of the universe. This came up because back in when I was doing a Masters in Philosophy of Science at Cambridge. I studied with Stephen Hawking and people like that, and I had an old cosmology text. I realized that I can estimate the amount of energy that's available in the universe, and I know that if I look in this book it will tell me how to count the number of bits that could be registered, so I thought I would look and see. If you wanted to build the most powerful computer you could, you can't do better than including everything in the universe that's potentially available. In particular, if you want to know when Moore's Law, this fantastic exponential doubling of the power of computers every couple of years, must end, it would have to be before every single piece of energy and matter in the universe is used to perform a computation. Actually, just to telegraph the answer, Moore's Law has to end in about 600 years, without doubt. Sadly, by that time the whole universe will be running Windows 2540, or something like that. 99.99% of the energy of the universe will have been listed by Microsoft by that point, and they'll want more! They really will have to start writing efficient software, by gum. They can't rely on Moore's Law to save their butts any longer.