Lloyd’s ultimate laptop

"Do you know when Pink Floyd awakened?" This question came out of my nine-year-old nephew. (Pink Floyd was a rock band in the 60s). Totally lost but at the same time impressed, I looked at his father, my brother, who then said: "He is your ultimate sponge. He just puts on the Encyclopedia CD and looks at things in random and is just fascinated by all that information." "Wow," I said to my brother, "and all you did then at that age was break things and eat bugs."

I just love how children these days make use of technology to break frontiers in getting information. Science and technology have made available to us, more than ever, not just information about the world, from the smallest (subatomic particles) to the largest (galaxies and universes). But more interestingly and far more important I think is that in the face of these developments, there are human beings who can take these pieces of information never before available, and make something out of them by framing them in terms of answering important questions. In my field of nature/science writing, I come across perspectives that I find supremely interesting, not to mention, fun, in terms of thinking of how science and technology relate to "stuff" I consider as part and parcel of my "dance" which is writing. And when I say "stuff" here and "part and parcel," I mean real stuff, i.e., materials such as a laptop.

I never leave for more than a day without my laptop. The portrait of my solitude includes it. It is a strange picture of aloneness but as a writer, it is not just what I carry but already part of how I will make sense of information I get in my research, from fieldwork as well as from books.  That is why after that Pink Floyd encounter, I was glued to an article I found written oddly enough by a rhyming name to match, Seth Lloyd, a mechanical engineering professor at MIT and a principal investigator at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics. Entitled "Moore’s Law and the Ultimate Laptop" (The New Humanists, John Brockman, ed., Barnes and Noble Books, NY 2003), it speculated on the outermost limits of the information-processing of a laptop weighing an average one kilogram, with a volume of a liter, given Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law is more of a fact about the history of technology than a law in the physical sense. It just states that the essential computing parts are getting smaller and smaller, about a factor of two, in the last ten years or so.  

Lloyd is a physicist so that means he is versed at looking at the world in terms of the limits imposed by fundamental laws of nature. This means that in order to know what the ultimate laptop would be capable of processing, he would have to consider questions relevant to what makes a laptop a laptop vis-à-vis the known inviolable physical laws.

First is speed. The reason why you go to a computer is that it can move one piece of information from one place to another at such a rate of speed that makes computational processes that were so tedious (which yielded more errors too) are now programmed. For example, statistical tests. Although I am grateful that I did study statistics, I am even more grateful now that once I have figured out for myself which statistical test would be best for my data to be meaningful, a computer program could run the test for me in less than 10 seconds. For the ultimate laptop, Lloyd asks: how fast could computers ultimately process information? Extremely fast, he says, but as with all things in nature, NOT faster than the speed of light. So keep that in mind when as one limits to imagining the features of your ultimate laptop.

Second is smallness. What makes small computers so fascinating is how much information they can store and process. But how small could a computer ultimately be to be useful? Lloyd says Planck’s constant, which simply put for us lay people, is the limit on how small things can get before they actually vanish and this is essential to keep in mind in considering "smallness" as a feature of your computer. So it would be a good guess that the ultimate laptop would be increasingly miniaturized but not infinitely.

Last is bigness. This relates to how much information can be stored and processed in your computer before it gets really "big" as to collapse in itself because of the physical law concerning the gravitational constant.

All these three considerations relate to matter and we all know by Einstein’s equation that matter is proportional to the energy it possesses. To cut a long equation short, Lloyd figured out after six months that the ultimate laptop should be able to process 1051 (that is 10 to the million billion billion billion billion billion billion operations per second). Pretty neat huh? But before you save up to order this laptop, you have to know that we are still far from it by leaps of magnitudes. Lloyd put it in perspective for us by saying that with current computers at gigahertz speed, we are approaching about 1012 operations per second and the human brain processes around a million bits per second. (The ultimate laptop being used by a human who can only process a minutiae of the information before her/him…but that’s another column). 

Lloyd, after first publishing that paper in Nature, predictably got orders for that ultimate laptop and he could not deliver due to certain handling problems. You see, the ultimate laptop would have serious "packaging problems" at the very least. Lloyd said that with that amount of energy released all at once by this one kilogram-laptop performing at those outermost limits of nature, it would "nuke" you and the city you are in the first time you even boot it because the equivalent energy of that one-kg laptop with a liter-volume releasing all that energy simultaneously would equal the weekly output of all the world’s nuclear energy plants. Pretty self-defeating and messy booting, isn’t it?

But I still love the way we human beings, especially, pose these questions, about our possibilities. It puts in context all that data floating in our minds and in cyberspace. That is why I still am impressed at my nephew even if he has absolutely no clue yet as to the meaning of all the information he is receiving. I think it is best encouraged and guided so that slowly, kids would realize for themselves, that information is kind of useless unless placed in perspective. It is a lifelong process. I know and like a lot of people who can blurt out a horde of trivia at a rate of 30 items/second. Trivia is the venue for throwing information for its sake which is not bad, I think, but should be treated as just that – trivia. Unless we are able to put all these universes of information within a context that is meaningful for particular situations and our lives in general, we would remain sponges and fail to make technology help us explore ways of being alive which is the very point of the scientific endeavor.