Feynman and Computation ─ Exploring the Limits of Computers

Richard P. Feynman made profoundly important and prescient contributions to the physics of computing, notably with his seminal articles ?There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” and ?Simulating Physics with Computers.” These two provocative papers (both reprinted in this volume) anticipated, decades before their time, several breakthroughs that have since become fields of science in their own right, such as nanotechnology and the newest, perhaps most exciting area of physics and computer science, quantum computing.The contributors to this book are all distinguished physicists and computer scientists, and many of them were guest lecturers in Feynman’s famous CalTech course on the limits of computers. they include Charles Bennett on Quantum Information Theory, Geoffrey Fox on Internetics, Norman Margolus on Crystalline Computation, and Tommaso Toffoli on the Fungibility of Computation.Both a tribute to Feynman and a new exploration of the limits of computers by some of today’s most influential scientists, Feynman and Computation continues the pioneering work started by Feynman and published by him in his own Lectures on Computation. This new computation volume consists of both original chapters and reprints of classic papers by leaders in the field. Feynman and Computation will generate great interest from the scientific community and provide essential background for further work in this field.

David Pines is research professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has made pioneering contributions to an understanding of many-body problems in condensed matter and nuclear physics, and to theoretical astrophysics. Editor of Perseus’ Frontiers in Physics series and former editor of American Physical Society’s Reviews of Modern Physics, Dr. Pines is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, a foreign member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Pines has received a number of awards, including the Eugene Feenberg Memorial Medal for Contributions to Many-Body Theory; the P.A.M. Dirac Silver Medal for the Advancement of Theoretical Physics; and the Friemann Prize in Condensed Matter Physics.