Physical Perspectives on Computation, Computational Perspectives on Physics

Offers an accessible yet cutting-edge tour of the many conceptual interconnections between physics and computer science.

List of figures; List of tables; Preface; Introduction Michael E. Cuffaro and Samuel C. Fletcher; Part I. The Computability of Physical Systems and Physical Systems as Computers: 1. Ontic pancomputationalism Gualtiero Piccinini and Neal G. Anderson; 2. Zuse's thesis, Gandy's thesis, and Penrose's thesis B. Jack Copeland, Oron Shagrir and Mark Sprevak; 3. Church's thesis, Turing's limits, and Deutsch's principle Rossella Lupacchini; Part II. The Implementation of Computation in Physical Systems: 4. How to make orthogonal positions parallel: revisiting the quantum parallelism thesis Armond Duwell; 5. How is there a physics of information? On characterizing physical evolution as information processing Owen J. E. Maroney and Christopher G. Timpson; 6. Abstraction/representation theory and the natural science of computation Dominic Horsman, Viv Kendon and Susan Stepney; Part III. Physical Perspectives on Computer Science: 7. Physics-like models of computation Klaus Sutner; 8. Feasible computation: methodological contributions from computational science Robert H. C. Moir; 9. Relativistic computation Hajnal Andréka, Judit X. Madarász, István Németi, Péter Németi and Gergely Székely; Part IV. Computational Perspectives on Physical Theory: 10. Intension in the physics of computation: lessons from the debate about Landauer's principle James Ladyman; 11. Maxwell's demon does not compute John D. Norton; 12. Quantum theory as a principle theory: insights from an information-theoretic reconstruction Adam Koberinski and Markus P. Müller; Bibliography; Index.