Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information - Hardcover

Vedral, Vlatko

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199237697 ISBN 13: 9780199237692

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2010

Synopsis

For a physicist, all the world's information. The Universe and its workings are the ebb and flow of information. We are all transient patterns of information, passing on the recipe for our basic forms to future generations using a four-letter digital code called DNA.

In this engaging and mind-stretching account, Vlatko Vedral considers some of the deepest questions about the Universe and considers the implications of interpreting it in terms of information. He explains the nature of information, the idea of entropy, and the roots of this thinking in thermodynamics. He describes the bizarre effects of quantum behaviour - effects such as 'entanglement', which Einstein called 'spooky action at a distance' and explores cutting edge work on the harnessing quantum effects in hyperfast quantum computers, and how recent evidence suggests that the weirdness of the quantum world, once thought limited to the tiniest scales, may reach into the macro world.

Vedral finishes by considering the answer to the ultimate question: where did all of the information in the Universe come from? The answers he considers are exhilarating, drawing upon the work of distinguished physicist John Wheeler. The ideas challenge our concept of the nature of particles, of time, of determinism, and of reality itself.

About this title

About the Author

Vlatko Vedral studied undergraduate theoretical physics at Imperial College London, where he also received a PhD for his work on 'Quantum Information Theory of Entanglement'. Since June 2009, Vedral has moved to Oxford as Professor of Quantum Information Science. Throughout his career he has held a number of visiting professorships at different international institutions. He has published more than 130 research papers and has written two textbooks. He has written for popular science journals and major daily newspapers, as well as doing extensive radio programmes and television interviews.

Reviews

*Starred Review* Scotty, you can beam me up now! The Star Trek fantasy of teleportation is emerging as a real possibility in the new science of quantum information. Readers who accept Vedral’s invitation to explore this revolutionary science will contemplate teleportation chambers—and quantum computers so fast they could crack all extant security systems. But for sheer intellectual adventure, nothing surpasses the basic theory of quantum information, which illuminates how scientific laws compress the information embedded in nature and how natural evolution itself exploits quantum information in defying the thermodynamics of entropy. Vedral even probes how quantum randomness could have precipitated the order of the universe out of utter nothingness. Not all readers will join Vedral in the leap of faith he makes when applying quantum-information precepts to metaphysical questions. But everyone will delight in the enthralling chronicle of a Bell Lab engineer, working in the 1940s merely to maximize a wire’s message-carrying capacity, who somehow stumbled through a hidden conceptual door, so opening a stunning new science. That science of quantum information as the essential constituent of the cosmos is fast incubating astonishing new insights into scientific, social, and philosophical problems. Rarely have so few pages contained so much mind-expanding energy! --Bryce Christensen

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0199237697
• ISBN 13: 9780199237692
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240