Ultimate physical limits to computation

Seth Lloyd ()
Additional contact information
Seth Lloyd: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 3-160

Nature, 2000, vol. 406, issue 6799, 1047-1054

Abstract: Computers are physical systems: the laws of physics dictate what they can and cannot do. In particular, the speed with which a physical device can process information is limited by its energy and the amount of information that it can process is limited by the number of degrees of freedom it possesses. Here I explore the physical limits of computation as determined by the speed of light c, the quantum scale ℏ and the gravitational constant G. As an example, I put quantitative bounds to the computational power of an ‘ultimate laptop’ with a mass of one kilogram confined to a volume of one litre.

Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/35023282 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:406:y:2000:i:6799:d:10.1038_35023282

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/35023282

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().