Merely by existing, all physical systems register information. And by
evolving dynamically in time, they transform and process that information. The
laws of physics determine the amount of information that a physical system can
register (number of bits) and the number of elementary logic operations that a
system can perform (number of ops). The universe is a physical system. This
paper quantifies the amount of information that the universe can register and
the number of elementary operations that it can have performed over its
history. The universe can have performed no more than 10120 ops on
1090 bits.Comment: 17 pages, TeX. submitted to Natur