Since I've been building quantum computers I've come around to thinking about the world in terms of how it processes information.
Similarly, another famous little quantum fluctuation that programs you is the exact configuration of your DNA.
People are becoming more and more interested in science, and that's because they realize that science impacts their daily lives in important ways.
Merely by existing and evolving in time - by existing - any physical system registers information, and by evolving in time it transforms or processes that information.
We have a picture for how complexity arises, because if the universe is computationally capable, maybe we shouldn't be so surprised that things are so entirely out of control.
The other neat thing about these quantum computers is that they're also storing a bit of information on every available degree of freedom.
This democratization of science, this making it public, is in a sense the realization of a promise that science has held for a long time.
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.
Clearly, packaging issues alone make it unlikely that this limit can be obtained, even setting aside the difficulties of stability and control.
So science is basically, at it most fundamental level, a public form of knowledge, a form of knowledge that is in principle accessible to everybody.
I build quantum computers that store information on individual atoms and then massage the normal interactions between the atoms to make them compute.