相关论文: A Computer Scientist's View of Life, the Universe,…

The rather unintuitive nature of quantum theory has led numerous people to develop sets of (physically motivated) principles that can be used to derive quantum mechanics from the ground up, in order to better understand where the structure…

A perplexing problem in understanding physical reality is why the universe seems comprehensible, and correspondingly why there should exist physical systems capable of comprehending it. In this essay I explore the possibility that rather…

The intriguing suggestion of Tegmark (1996) that the universe--contrary to all our experiences and expectations--contains only a small amount of information due to an extremely high degree of internal symmetry is critically examined. It is…

With the great success in simulating many intelligent behaviors using computing devices, there has been an ongoing debate whether all conscious activities are computational processes. In this paper, the answer to this question is shown to…

The physical processes that determine the properties of our everyday world, and of the wider cosmos, are determined by some key numbers: the 'constants' of micro-physics and the parameters that describe the expanding universe in which we…

The development of science and technology has progressively demonstrated the ability of humankind to understand and manipulate the physical world, and it has also shown some fundamental limitations to predictability of physical events. This…

The idea of a multiverse -- an ensemble of universes or universe domains -- has received increasing attention in cosmology, both as the outcome of the originating process that generated our own universe, and as an explanation for why our…

The job of a physicist is to describe Nature. General features, hypotheses and theories help to describe physics phenomena at a more abstract, fundamental level, and are sometimes tacitly assigned some sort of real existence; doing so…

Even when completely and consistently formulated, a fundamental theory of physics and cosmological boundary conditions may not give unambiguous and unique predictions for the universe we observe; indeed inflation, string/M theory, and…

It goes without saying that we are stuck with the universe we have. Nevertheless, we would like to go beyond simply describing our observed universe, and try to understand why it is that way rather than some other way. Physicists and…

We approach the question "What is Consciousness?" in a new way, not as Descartes' "systematic doubt", but as how organisms find their way in their world. Finding one's way involves finding possible uses of features of the world that might…

We argue that computation is an abstract algebraic concept, and a computer is a result of a morphism (a structure preserving map) from a finite universal semigroup.

It is first pointed out that there is a common mathematical model for the universe and the quantum computer. The former is called the histories approach to quantum mechanics and the latter is called measurement based quantum computation.…

The concept of the cosmic web, viewing the Universe as a set of discrete galaxies held together by gravity, is deeply engrained in cosmology. Yet, little is known about the most effective construction and the characteristics of the…

We develop a notion of computability and complexity of functions over the reals, which seems to be very natural when one tries to determine just how "difficult" a certain function is. This notion can be viewed as an extension of both BSS…

As observers of the universe we are quantum physical systems within it. If the universe is very large in space and/or time, the probability becomes significant that the data on which we base predictions is replicated at other locations in…

The familiar theories of physics have the feature that the application of the theory to make predictions in specific circumstances can be done by means of an algorithm. We propose a more precise formulation of this feature --- one based on…

Rich clusters of galaxies, the largest virialized systems known, provide a powerful tool for the study of cosmology. Some of the fundamental questions that can be addressed with clusters of galaxies include: how did galaxies and large-scale…

At first sight, an accurate description of the state of the universe appears to require a mind-bogglingly large and perhaps even infinite amount of information, even if we restrict our attention to a small subsystem such as a rabbit. In…

We use the powerful tools of counting complexity and generic oracles to help understand the limitations of the complexity of quantum computation. We show several results for the probabilistic quantum class BQP. 1. BQP is low for PP, i.e.,…