About Us The RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce): an enlightenment organisation committed to finding innovative and creative practical solutions to today’s social challenges. Through its ideas, research and 27,000-strong Fellowship it seeks to harness the extraordinary amount of untapped creative potential in society - by empowering people to be active participants in creating a better world. Overview of the RSA The RSA is a registered charity. We depend on support from our funders, Fellows and sponsors. Action and Research Centre RSA Action and Research Centre combines practical experimentation with rigorous research to create a unique programme of work. Events Tackling the challenges we face in the 21st century requires us to draw on the best thinking and new evidence about the world around us. Fellowship Working with our global network of 27,000 Fellows to be a force for civic innovation and social change. House Our mission Find out more about our mission
The universe is a quantum computer Seth Lloyd WHAT is the universe made of? Matter or energy? Particles or strings? According to physicist Vlatko Vedral's appealing new book, it is made, at bottom, of information. In other words, if you break the universe into smaller and smaller pieces, the smallest pieces are, in fact, bits. With this theme in mind, Vedral embarks on an exuberant romp through physics, biology, philosophy, religion and even personal finance. Any system that has two distinct states can act as a bit - even an individual elementary particle: "electron over here" represents zero, "electron over there" represents one. At this smallest of scales, however, the universe is governed by the famously weird laws of quantum mechanics. Over the last two decades, a flourishing field of quantum information and computation has generated a wealth of experimental and theoretical tests of information processing at the quantum scale.
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