

The universe as quantum computer - kowdermeister
http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4455

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josh-wrale
Highlights, IMHO (still reading, but wanted to make an early note):

\- "We human beings have a sloppy, if not outright bad habit of assigning
advances to a few ‘great men.’ I call this habit the Pythagoras syndrome,
after the tendency in the western world to assign all pre-fourth century
B.C.E. mathematics to Pythagoras without regard to actual origins. In
evaluating Turing’s contributions, we should be careful not to fall victim to
the Pythagoras syndrome, if only to give full credit to his actual
contributions, which were specific and great."

\- "Babbage turned his efforts to the design of an ‘analytic engine.’
Programmed by punched cards like a Jacquard loom, the analytic engine would
have been a universal digital computer."

\- "The science fiction genre known as ‘steampunk’ speculates how the world
might have evolved if nineteenth century technology had been up to the task of
constructing the difference and analytical engines. (Per- haps the best-known
example of the steampunk genre is William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s novel,
‘The Difference Engine’ [4].)"

\- "Turing’s great contribution to logic can be thought of as the rejection of
logic as a Platonic ideal, and the redefinition logic as a process."

