I made use of some airplane time yesterday to scan through a recent issue of Wired (which mysteriously started showing up in my mailbox a few months back and has grown on me thereby validating the editors’ proposition that if they sent it, I would read it. I hate being that predictable, but there you have it).
p. 64 has an interview with Seth Lloyd, MIT physicist and “quantum mechanic”, titled Life, the Universe, and Everything (oddly enough, can’t find it online, if someone else can and sends it to me I’ll link it here). In it Seth talks about his recent book Programming the Universe and about how his viewpoint is that the entire universe is a gigantic quantum computer running a simulation, of, well …. the universe.
He says
When you zap things with light to build quantum computers, you’re hacking existing systems. You’re hijacking the computation that’s already happening in the universe, just like a hacker takes over someone else’s computer
I’d say be careful Seth, if I were to find a trojan running on one of the various computers I look after, installing it’s own programs on my compute device, I’d delete it!