Faster than a speeding gluon, more powerful than a nuclear blast, able to crunch data in colossal bursts? It’s the ultimate laptop, envisioned by Seth Lloyd of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and it stretches the laws of physics to their limits.
“Computers are physical systems,” Lloyd contends. “The laws of physics dictate what they can and cannot do.” Lloyd invokes a combination of relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and the laws of thermodynamics to elucidate these outer limits. He describes the result—his hypothetical ultracomputer—in the Aug. 31 Nature.