#computation

No sociologist should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time. ↗

— Max Weber

#computations #even #good #head #himself

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? ↗

— Seth Lloyd

#ask #been #capable #computations #digital

The desire to economize time and mental effort in arithmetical computations, and to eliminate human liability to error is probably as old as the science of arithmetic itself. ↗

— Howard Aiken

#arithmetical #computations #desire #economize #effort

My father taught me Basic and rudimentary C, I learned everything else on my own, including studying computational complexity on my own. That's more a function of my age than anything else though - back when I was in school there were hardly any programming classes. ↗

— Bram Cohen

#any #anything #back #basic #classes

The three-pound organ in your skull - with its pink consistency of Jell-o - is an alien kind of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly outstrips anything we've dreamt of building. ↗

— David Eagleman

#anything #building #composed #computational #consistency

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. ↗

— Seth Lloyd

#consists #define #determine #how #information

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. ↗

— Seth Lloyd

#computation #computer #digital #fact #i

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. ↗

— Seth Lloyd

#basis #capacity #complex #computational #explanation

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. ↗

— Seth Lloyd

#computational #hope #i #make #metaphor

I have just gone over my comet computations again, and it is humiliating to perceive how very little more I know than I did seven years ago when I first did this kind of work. ↗

— Maria Mitchell

#ago #comet #computations #did #first