446 | 41 IS THE wHOlE UNIVERSE A COmPUTER?
figure 41.1 Is the universe a computer? The Pillars of Creation, in the distant Eagle Nebula (taken by the Hubble
Space Telescope).
Posted to Wikimedia Commons and licensed under public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pillars_of_
creation_ 2014_HST_WFC3-UVIS_full-res_denoised.jpg.
connections) also functions as the memory. Even Babbage’s Analytical Engine (Chapter 24) was
a computer, despite being built from mechanical rather than electrical parts. As Turing said:^1
The fact that Babbage’s Analytical Engine was to be entirely mechanical will help us to rid our-
selves of a superstition. Importance is often attached to the fact that modern digital computers
are electrical, and that the nervous system also is electrical. Since Babbage’s machine was not
electrical... we see that this use of electricity cannot be of theoretical importance.
In fact, there is astonishing variety among the computers that are currently being researched
or prototyped by computer scientists. There are massively parallel and distributed computers,