14 DAY TRIAL // For several years, physicists have been trying to harness the power of quantum physics to produce a quantum computer. This device would far exceed the capabilities of normal computers, but building it is proven to be very hard. Researchers now propose using black holes as quantum computers.
According to Seth Lloyd, who is a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Cambridge, every system is a quantum computer. In this context, the word system may refer to anything from a person or a river to a galaxy or a black hole.
In other words, what the researcher is proposing is that information is in fact a physical value, as quantifiable as mass or motion. The MIT expert also developed a series of calculations to validate his new proposal.
“A computer made up of all the energy in the entire known universe (that is, within the visible 'horizon' of 42 billion light-years) can store about 1092 bits of information and can perform 10105 computations/second,” he explains.
Since the Big Bang, the Universe itself has been performing as many as 10122 computations per second. It could therefore be possible to harness one of the systems in the Cosmos as a local quantum computer, and Lloyd gives the example of the supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way.
This object could serve as both a quantum computer and a data storage bank that could be easily accessible at a moment's notice and also capable of conducting volumes of calculations on demand.
The MIT expert says that all black holes emit Hawking radiation, which inadvertently carry a large amount of information about the material contained within each of these cosmic structures. Lloyd says that understanding how and why this happens is key for putting the structures to good use.
He explains that matter falling through the event horizon easily becomes entangled with the radiation being released through the black hole's poles. As such, high-energy particles carry processed information about matter that entered the singularity, Daily Galaxy reports.
“We might be able to figure out a way to essentially program the black hole by putting in the right collection of matter,” the MIT investigator explains. If we harness this technology, then the implications would be mind-boggling.
We could conceivably become capable of storing all our data inside black holes or galaxies, at several individual locations for redundancy purposes. At the same time, the structures could be used for advanced calculations and computer modeling.