Seth Lloyd

Seth Lloyd (born August 2, 1960) is an American engineer, and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.

Quotes

 * Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.
 * Nature 430, 971 (26 August 2004); doi:10.1038/430971a


 * 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.
 * Seth Lloyd, cited in: Michael Schmiechen (2009) Newton's Principia Revisited. p. 885


 * For hundreds of millions of years, Sex was the most efficient method for propagating information of dubious provenance: the origins of all those snippets of junk DNA are lost in the sands of reproductive history. Move aside, Sex: the world-wide Web has usurped your role.
 * "Move Aside, Sex", in The Edge Annual Question—2010: How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?, January 2010


 * Quantum mechanics is weird. I don't understand it. Just live with it. You don't have to understand the nature of things in order to build cool devices…If you can figure out how to take advantage of this quantum multitasking, we can build computers that can do computations that no classical computer could do even if it were the size of the entire universe.
 * Seth Lloyd, cited in: Scott Dewing (2011) "Seth Lloyd on quantum computing" blog.insidethebox.org, 9/23/2011