In order to figure out how to make atoms compute, you have to learn how to speak their language and to understand how they process information under normal circumstances.

Some folks think life and technology and mind can keep expanding forever. Others say it can't. We are still not clear on that.

Thinking of the universe as a computer is controversial.

It's also a reasonable scientific program to look at the dynamics of the standard model and to try to prove from that dynamics that it is computationally capable.

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes, and the second law of thermodynamics.

Quantum mechanics is just completely strange and counterintuitive. We can't believe that things can be here [in one place] and there [in another place] at the same time. And yet that's a fundamental piece of quantum mechanics. So then the question is, life is dealing us weird lemons, can we make some weird lemonade from this?

Meaning is like pornography, you know it when you see it.