Seth Lloyd in Edge:
Twenty-five years ago, I started working on the problem of quantum computing, which is how atoms and molecules, photons, elementary particles, process information. At that point, there were only half a dozen people in the world looking at this problem, and now there are thousands. There goes the neighborhood. In any field that expands by so much so rapidly, there are now all kinds of branches on this tree. There are still branches of the fundamental questions of how we understand the world, in terms of how it processes information. Right now, there's been a resurgence of interest in ideas of applying quantum mechanics and quantum information to ideas of quantum gravity, and what the fundamental theory of the universe actually is. It turns out that quantum information has a lot to offer people who are looking at problems like, for instance, what happens when you fall into a black hole? (By the way, my advice is don't do that if you can help it.) If you fall into a black hole, does any information about you ever escape from the black hole? These are questions that people like Stephen Hawking have been working on for decades. It turns out that quantum information has a lot to give to answer these questions.
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