We have a picture for how complexity arises, because if the universe is computationally capable, maybe we shouldn't be so surprised that things are so entirely out of control.

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics.

Indeed, as the above calculation indicates, to take full advantage of the memory space available, the ultimate laptop must turn all its matter into energy.

According to the standard model billions of years ago some little quantum fluctuation, perhaps a slightly lower density of matter, maybe right where we're sitting right now, caused our galaxy to start collapsing around here.

In this metaphor we actually have a picture of the computational universe, a metaphor which I hope to make scientifically precise as part of a research program.

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.

At some point, Moore's law will break down.

All physical systems can be thought of as registering and processing information, and how one wishes to define computation will determine your view of what computation consists of.

I would suggest, merely as a metaphor here, but also as the basis for a scientific program to investigate the computational capacity of the universe, that this is also a reasonable explanation for why the universe is complex.

Computers are famous for being able to do complicated things starting from simple programs.

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.

Merely by existing and evolving in time - by existing - any physical system registers information, and by evolving in time it transforms or processes that information.

One of the things that I've been doing recently in my scientific research is to ask this question: Is the universe actually capable of performing things like digital computations?

We have a picture for how complexity arises, because if the universe is computationally capable, maybe we shouldn't be so surprised that things are so entirely out of control.

Something else has happened with computers.

Of course, one way of thinking about all of life and civilization is as being about how the world registers and processes information. Certainly that's what sex is about; that's what history is about.

It's also a reasonable scientific program to look at the dynamics of the standard model and to try to prove from that dynamics that it is computationally capable.

Thinking of the universe as a computer is controversial.

Similarly, another famous little quantum fluctuation that programs you is the exact configuration of your DNA.

I have not proved that the universe is, in fact, a digital computer and that it's capable of performing universal computation, but it's plausible that it is.

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.

There are considerable advantages to using many degrees of freedom to store information, stability and controllability being perhaps the most important.

If you take a more Darwinian point of view the dynamics of the universe are such that as the universe evolved in time, complex systems arose out of the natural dynamics of the universe.

The amount of information that can be stored by the ultimate laptop, 10 to the 31st bits, is much higher than the 10 to the 10th bits stored on current laptops.

Science consists exactly of those forms of knowledge that can be verified and duplicated by anybody.

Another feature that everybody notices about the universe is that it's complex.

Instead of having to be a member of the Royal Society to do science, the way you had to be in England in the 17th, 18th, centuries today pretty much anybody who wants to do it can, and the information that they need to do it is there.

What's happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can register and process huge amounts of information, which is a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process.

Of course, not everybody's willing to go out and do the experiments, but for the people who are willing to go out and do that, - if the experiments don't work, then it means it's not science.

The orthogonal features, when combined, can explode into complexity.

The Tax Code today is more complicated than ever, and the very people on the Republican side who denounce the Tax Code's complexity are the ones that put together what they now call a convoluted monstrosity. They put it into effect.

Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.

Armageddon is not around the corner. This is only what the people of violence want us to believe. The complexity and diversity of the world is the hope for the future.

The complexity of the emotional life of the play is what you live to work on.

We need to shift the paradigm from reactive technologies to more integrative solutions that deal with the variety and complexity of the threats that are out there today.

What we call 'evil' doesn't necessarily deserve any kind of respect or understanding, by any means; it just deserves an acknowledgement of its complexity so we can better understand it - so we can help prevent it.

The intellectual evolution of the race consists in an increase in the number, delicacy, complexity, permanence and speed of formation of such associations.

A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

This growth in the number, speed of formation, permanence, delicacy and complexity of associations possible for an animal reaches its acme in the case of man.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

Complexity is one of the great problems in environmental design.

From time immemorial, man has desired to comprehend the complexity of nature in terms of as few elementary concepts as possible.

We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.

We're all complex human beings, and if some of that complexity shows through, I think it's advantageous for the movie.

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.

I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.

I don't really have preferred roles except those with some complexity.

I have been interested in phenomena involving complexity, diversity and evolution since I was a young boy.