Paola Zizzi

Italian astrophysicist Paola Zizzi is perhaps most notable for her work in the field of Loop quantum gravity theory that regards the early universe as a kind of quantum computer. She proposed that the universe could have achieved the threshold of computational complexity sufficient for the emergence of consciousness during the period of cosmic inflation, in a paper entitled "Emergent Consciousness: From the Early Universe to Our Mind" [http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0007006 gr-qc/0007006] , which has become known as the Big Wow theory. She gives a detailed description of the quantum gravitational aspects of this notion in a later paper entitled "A Minimal Model for Quantum Gravity" [http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0409069 gr-qc/0409069] , that derives the conditions for quantum gravity from a minimal set of assumptions, and is also called Computational Loop Quantum Gravity, or CLQG. She may have coined the phrase 'It from Qubit' in imitation of John Archibald Wheeler, who used the term "It from Bit" to describe how the universe came to be. Paola is currently with the Department of Pure and Applied Mathematics, at the University of Padova, in Italy, and her most recent work has been on the subject of quantum measurement, and quantum entanglement.

Zizzi's work was cited by Seth Lloyd and Jack Ng in their cover article for the November 2004 "Scientific American", entitled "Black Hole Computers," and by Gregory Chaitin in his paper "Epistemology as Information Theory: From Leibniz to Ω," which was the Alan Turing Lecture on Computing and Philosophy, in Västerås, Sweden June 2005.

Zizzi is becoming well-known in the field of quantum Computing, as well as astrophysics. She presented her work on "Quantum Computability at the Planck Scale" at CiE 2005, and on "The Logic of Entanglement" at DICE 2006.

See also

* Quantum brain dynamics

External links

Material referring to, or related to, Zizzi's work:
* [http://quantum.ibiocat.eu/eng/index.php?pagina=42 Quantumbionet]
* [http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/cosm.html Tony Smith's Cosmology pages]
* [http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/QuanCon3.html Tony's pages on Quantum Consciousness]
* [http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/overview.html From Stuart Hameroff's Quantum Consciousness site]
* [http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/ecap.html Gregory Chaitin's "Epistemology as Information Theory: From Leibniz to Ω"]

Some of Paola Zizzi's notable papers:
* [http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0007006 Emergent Consciousness: From the Early Universe to Our Mind]
* [http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0409069 A Minimal Model for Quantum Gravity]
* [http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0304032 Spacetime at the Planck Scale: The Quantum Computer View]