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Seth Lloyd

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Seth Lloyd
BornAugust 2, 1960
NationalityAmerican
Alma materPhillips Academy
Harvard College
Cambridge University
Rockefeller University
Known forStudying limits of computation
Scientific career
FieldsPhysicist
InstitutionsMassachusetts Institute of Technology
California Institute of Technology
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Doctoral advisorHeinz Pagels
Doctoral studentsDaniel S. Abrams
Richard Joseph Nelson
Lin Tian

Seth Lloyd is a professor of mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He refers to himself as a "quantum mechanic".

Lloyd was born on August 2, 1960. He graduated from Phillips Academy in 1978 and received a bachelor of arts degree from Harvard College in 1982. He earned a certificate of advanced study in mathematics and a master of philosophy degree from Cambridge University in 1983 and 1984, while on a Marshall Scholarship. Lloyd was awarded a doctorate by Rockefeller University in 1988 (advisor Heinz Pagels) after submitting a thesis on Black Holes, Demons, and the Loss of Coherence: How Complex Systems Get Information, and What They Do With It. After postdoctoral fellowships at the California Institute of Technology and Los Alamos National Laboratory, he joined MIT in 1994.

His research area is the interplay of information with complex systems, especially quantum systems. He has made contributions to the field of quantum computation and proposed a design for a quantum computer.

In his book, Programming the Universe, Lloyd contends that the universe itself is one big quantum computer producing what we see around us, and ourselves, as it runs a cosmic program. According to Lloyd, once we understand the laws of physics completely, we will be able to use small-scale quantum computing to understand the universe completely as well.

Lloyd states that we could have the whole universe simulated in a computer in 600 years provided that computational power increases according to Moore's Law. However, Lloyd shows that there are limits to rapid exponential growth in a finite universe, and that it is very unlikely that Moore's Law will be maintained indefinitely.

Lloyd is principal investigator at the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, and directs the Center for Extreme Quantum Information Theory (xQIT) at MIT.

Works

  • Lloyd, S. (2000-08-31). "Ultimate physical limits to computation" (PDF). Nature. 406: 1047–1054. doi:10.1038/35023282. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  • Lloyd, S., Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos, Knopf, March 14, 2006, 240 p., ISBN 1-4000-4092-2

See also

External links

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