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Seth Lloyd

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Seth Lloyd
Seth Lloyd in 2013
Born (1960-08-02) August 2, 1960 (age 64)
NationalityAmerican
Alma materPhillips Academy (1978)
Harvard College (A.B., 1982)
Cambridge University (M.Phil, 1984)
Rockefeller University (Ph.D. physics, 1988)
Known forStudying limits of computation
Programming the Universe
Scientific career
FieldsPhysicist
InstitutionsMassachusetts Institute of Technology
California Institute of Technology
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Santa Fe Institute
Doctoral advisorHeinz Pagels
Doctoral studentsDaniel S. Abrams
Richard Joseph Nelson
Lin Tian

Seth Lloyd (born August 2, 1960) is a professor of mechanical engineering and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He refers to himself as a "quantum mechanic".

His research area is the interplay of information with complex systems, especially quantum systems. He has performed seminal work in the fields of quantum computation, quantum communication and quantum biology, including proposing the first technologically feasible design for a quantum computer, demonstrating the viability of quantum analog computation, proving quantum analogs of Shannon's noisy channel theorem, and designing novel methods for quantum error correction and noise reduction.

Biography

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.

From 1988 to 1991, Lloyd was a postdoctoral fellow in the High Energy Physics Department at the California Institute of Technology, where he worked with Murray Gell-Mann on applications of information to quantum-mechanical systems. From 1991 to 1994, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he worked at the Center for Nonlinear Systems on quantum computation. In 1994, he joined the faculty of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Since 1988, Lloyd has also been an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute.

In his 2006 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. His most recent work has focused on the role of quantum phenomena such as coherence in biological phenomena, especially photosynthesis.[1]. He has also collaborated in work to exploit these phenomena technologically[1]

Personal life

Lloyd is married to Eve Zimmerman, a professor of Japanese studies at Wellesley College.

Honors

Works

  • Lloyd, Seth (1988). Black Holes, Demons and the Loss of Coherence: How complex systems get information, and what they do with it (PDF) (Ph.D. thesis). The Rockefeller University.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Hewitt, J MIT team genetically engineers a quantum virus for efficient energy transport Extreme Tech 16 October 2015
  2. ^ "2007 Fellows of the American Physical Society".
  3. ^ "2012 QCMC".
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