I have been awarded the Edge of Computation Science Prize for 2005.

For a long time my standard answer to the question ‘how long will it be before the first universal quantum computer is built?’ was ‘several decades at least’. In fact, I have been saying this for almost exactly two decades … and now I am pleased to report that recent theoretical advances have caused me to conclude that we are within sight of that goal. It may well be achieved within the next decade.

The main discovery that has made the difference is cluster quantum computation, which is a marvellous new way of structuring quantum computations which makes them far easier to implement physically.

The BBC reports on the world’s shortest-lived vertebrate:

The pygmy goby lives an average of 59 days, pipping the previous record holder, an African fish which lives for just over two-and-a-half months.

Nothing fishy about the story so far. But now:

A team from James Cook University in Australia reports that the tiny coral reef goby lives a frantic existence to avoid becoming extinct.

No. No. And thrice no.

I bet they don’t report anything of the sort. Or if they do, they should know better.

There is no force, process or phenomenon on Earth – other than the efforts of a few eccentric humans – that specifically counteracts the extinction of any species. That includes the evolution of the goby’s own genes. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the 59-day lifespan is optimal for the survival of the goby species. It is optimal for spreading through the goby population in competition with both 58-day and 60-day variants. That’s all. If the species dies as a result, evolution and the species’ genes will neither ‘know’ nor ‘care’.

For all we know, the optimum life span to avoid extinction of the species is 63 days, or a year, or a hundred years. No, that’s not where species selection comes in. If there are a thousand isolated populations of gobys living under the same selection pressures, it is not the case that the one that happens to host a mutant, optimally-species-preserving hundred-year-lifespan gene will still be around when all the other populations have gone extinct: it will go extinct first, in the sense that it will be rapidly taken over by ever shorter-lived mutants, in whose favour, we know, the selection pressure operates. Species selection, if it happens at all, can only be a vanishingly rare, insignificant phenomenon.

And they’re not ‘living a frantic existence’ to avoid the predators, any more than they are living a sluggish existence to avoid whatever marginally impedes the replication of 58-day variants. They are adapted.

Am I the only person to have noticed a remarkable similarity between the map of anisotropies in the microwave background radiation revealed by the WMAP satellite and a map of our own planet? You can see them both here.

Wouldn’t it be funny if they were even more alike? What if they were exactly the same? Look how easy it would be for a coach and horses to run through our entire scientific world view. And yet they never do.

Michael Lockwood’s book The Labyrinth of Time: Introducing the Universe has just appeared. I highly recommend it. It’s a wonderful overview of the physics and philosophy of time, crafted extremely carefully and engagingly (yet without compromising any content) for the lay reader, superbly produced and illustrated.

Oh, and it’s true.

You can buy it from  or from .

The Fabric of Reality is being translated into Romanian. It should appear in mid-2006. The Greek and Polish translations seem to be interminably delayed, and will probably go to other publishers.

Die Welt ist bizarr, an interview with me, translated into German, appeared in Der Spiegel.

From the moment my new PowerBook arrived at the door, to the moment it was fully set up and in use, including the copying of the entire state of my old Powerbook, took 1 hour and 25 minutes. There were no hitches.

I think the previous record was something like three days…

As I understand it, the claim is that the less you use Homeopathy, the better it works. Sounds plausible to me.

Science and Ultimate Reality is the book of a conference celebrating the 90th birthday of John Archibald Wheeler. My contribution is called It From Qubit and is about the various ways in which computation is, and, importantly, is not, fundamental in physics. It also contains a contribution by Bryce DeWitt called The Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics, and several other interesting articles.