Computer scientist Tomasso Toffoli once remarked that "we never perform a computation ourselves, we just hitch a ride on the great Computation that is going on already."
"To him this is no cry of despair," says Professor David Deutsch, a British physicist at the University of Oxford, "Quite the contrary. But critics of the computer-science-world-view do no want to see themselves as just someone else's program running on someone else's computer."
For the past 50 years, scientists have theorized that the universe can be regarded as a giant quantum computer.
The physical universe does not seem to resemble the collection of wires, transistors, and electrical circuitry that make up a conventional digital computer.
So how then, can one claim that the universe that we see around us - is a computer?
The answer is yes, we can claim it, says Seth Lloyd-Professor of Quantum-Mechanical Engineering at MIT and originator of the first technologically feasible design for a working quantum computer.
