WHATEVER kind of reality you think you're living in, you're probably wrong. The universe is a computer, and everything that goes on in it can be explained in terms of information processing.

The connection between reality and computing may not be immediately obvious, but strip away the layers and that is exactly what some researchers think we find. We think of the world as made up of particles held together by forces, for instance, but quantum theory tells us that these are just a mess of fields we can only properly describe by invoking the mathematics of quantum physics.

That's where the computer comes in, at least if you think of it in conceptual terms as something that processes information rather than as a boxy machine on your desk. "Quantum physics is almost phrased in terms of information processing," says Vlatko Vedral of the University of Oxford. "It's suggestive that you will find information processing at the root of everything."