Ultimate physical limits to computation

Computers are physical systems: the laws of physics dictate what they can and cannot do. In particular, the speed with which a physical device can process information is limited by its energy and the amount of information that it can process is limited by the number of degrees of freedom it possesses. Here I explore the physical limits of computation as determined by the speed of light c, the quantum scale ℏ and the gravitational constant G. As an example, I put quantitative bounds to the computational power of an ‘ultimate laptop’ with a mass of one kilogram confined to a volume of one litre.

• Publication year

  1999

• Venue

  Nature

• Publication date

  1999-08-13

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Physics, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1038/35023282arXiv quant-ph/9908043PMID 10984064
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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