Everything You See Is a Computational Process, If You Know How to Look

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

In the movie Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr challenges the physicist early in his career:

Bohr: Algebra is like sheet music. The important thing isn’t “can you read music?” It’s “can you hear it?” Can you hear the music, Robert?

Oppenheimer: Yes, I can.

I can’t hear the algebra, but I feel the machine.

I felt the machine even before I touched a computer. In the 1970s I awaited the arrival of my first one, a Radio Shack TRS-80, imagining how it would function. I wrote some simple programs on paper and could feel the machine I didn’t yet have processing each step. It

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