I like big numbers, but this one is making my day. Here we go.
Seth Lloyd, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, has estimated how much information the Universe can contain, and how many calculations it has performed since the Big Bang.
Lloyd views every process, every change that takes place in the Universe, as a kind of computation. One way of looking at the exercise is to imagine setting up a simulation of the Universe, particle for particle, on a hypothetical super-duper computer.
To simulate the Universe in every detail since time began, the computer would have to have 1090 bits - binary digits, or devices capable of storing a 1 or a 0 - and it would have to perform 10120 manipulations of those bits. Unfortunately there are probably only around 1080 elementary particles in the Universe.
Pretty incredible, isn't?
Source: Philip Ball, Nature, June 3, 2002
1:54:37 PM Permalink
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