Konrad Zuse

Konrad Zuse (1910–1995) was a German engineer and computer pioneer who built the Z3, widely regarded as the first programmable, fully automatic digital computer.

Late in his career he turned from building computers to a radical conjecture about physics itself: in 1969 he published Rechnender Raum (translated 1970 as Calculating Space), the first work of digital physics.

In it he proposed that all processes in the universe are computational — that physical reality is being computed by some sort of cellular automaton or other discrete machinery, rather than evolving by continuous laws.

Zuse’s place in this Atlas is as the originator of the universe-as-computation thesis, the foundational ancestor of what is now variously called digital physics, digital philosophy, pancomputationalism, and the simulation hypothesis.

He argued that just as chemistry reduces to physics, physics might reduce to theoretical computer science, and he noted that classical notions like entropy growth sit awkwardly inside a deterministically computed cosmos.

For the mind-power lineage he supplies the serious scientific root of “reality is information being processed,” the idea downstream thinkers extend toward consciousness-and-simulation speculation.