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From: cbbrowne@watnot.UUCP (Christopher Browne)
Newsgroups: net.arch
Subject: Re: electrons as a bound on memory size (was VLMM, crypt)
Message-ID: <12007@watnot.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 18-Sep-86 14:43:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: watnot.12007
Posted: Thu Sep 18 14:43:35 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 19-Sep-86 23:56:56 EDT
References: <15505@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <5100124@ccvaxa> <972@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <505@gvax.cs.cornell.edu>
Reply-To: cbbrowne@watnot.UUCP (Christopher Browne)
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 31
Keywords: :-)

In article <505@gvax.cs.cornell.edu> jqj@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (J Q Johnson) writes:
>JRB3 writes:
>>The point is that our memory is based on electrons.
>
>It has been argued that the number of electrons in the universe puts a bound
>on the potential maximum memory size of a computer.  Reflection should convince
>you that this argument is specious:  the real limitation is the number of
>different energy states possible, and hence is constrained only by the Pauli
>exclusion principal and by your imagination.  As a simple example, you can
>encode more than 1 bit of data with a single electron in the shell of a
>hydrogen atom simply by using different energy states.  For that matter you
>can encode data within a nucleus by using different energy states.
>
It should be remembered that if we are trying to model all of the electrons in
the universe at the beginning, (assuming that more have not come into existance,
which really fouls things up anyway), we must consider all of the possible
energy states for each electron.  Thus, much more than one bit per electron to
be modeled.  There aren't enough  electrons to allow storage of the data, as
well as to run the computer & program to process the data.   :-)

-- 
            Christopher Browne
            University of Waterloo
            Faculty of Mathematics

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