Testable theory suggests information has mass
aip.scitation.org
aip.scitation.org
To test the hypothesis it's not enough just to weigh the memory. You must ensure that the energy stored in the memory has not been increased, because energy increases the weight of the memory device. (relaxed spring weighs less than tensed spring, storing energy in capacitors increases the weight of the memory).
The paper: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794
>Here we formulate a new principle of mass-energy-information equivalence proposing that a bit of information is not just physical, as already demonstrated, but it has a finite and quantifiable mass while it stores information.
(...)
>Assuming that all the missing dark matter is in fact information mass, the initial estimates (to be reported in a different article) indicate that ∼10^93 bits would be sufficient to explain all the missing dark matter in the visible Universe. Remarkably, this number is reasonably close to another estimate of the Universe information bit content of ∼10^87 given by Gough in 2008 via a different approach.12 In fact, one could argue that information is a distinct form of matter, or the 5th state, along the other four observable solid, liquid, gas, and plasma states of matter. It is expected that this work will stimulate further theoretical and experimental research, bringing the scientific community one-step closer to understanding the abstract nature of matter, energy and information in the Universe.
ps. AIP advances is so called scientific mega journal. It has very low selectivity and don't select articles based on importance. They are "peer reviewed" only in the lowest criteria possible.
So, I don't see why you couldn't use the particle label when referring to information. How about an "infon"?
If you insist, sure, you can make up an infon and call it a particle. However, it would not behave like anything a physicist would call a particle, nor would it use any of the mathematical tools that were developed to deal with particles, nor it would provide any useful intuition or insight, nor would it provide any pedagogical value. And at that point why bother calling it a particle if it does not behave like one.
While the idea is interesting, the actual proposed experiment is laughable. It's like suggesting that a mechanical light switch should have different weight when switched on or off.
Well, in principle it should have a different weight to account for the extra electrons moving around when it’s turned on. Every time you have a change in charge you have a corresponding mas change.
My problem with this idea is the fact that not all information is electronic in nature, in which case you would be arguing that the weight of a completed puzzle is different than the total weight of the individual pieces, for example.
In general, this would imply that changes in entropy would correspond to changes in mass...
I can see this discussion go very far into metaphysical. :)
I don't have a clue, I just think it's a relevant question at this point.
But in any case, you would be measuring the mass of electrons and not the information they represent. This theory suggests that a storage device would have additional mass dependent on information content, so things like whitening / encryption would not matter.
However, here is a question that immediately occurs: If I have a message with "informational mass" x, and encrypt it, does the encrypted message has the same informational mass, or is the mass of the encrypted message the same as a random message of the same length?
In that case you do not have to account for the electron mass at all.
Furthermore, information is related to interpretation. A string of bits may be an uncompressed text file, a set of numbers, a compressed image, etc. But it's always the same amount of bits. How can my interpretation of that set of bits affect its mass?
There's quite a bit of difference between how we usually think about information and how information theory treats it. There it's all about entropy.
As I said to the above poster I don't know much about this, so hope this isn't an off-base question.
The meaning of a certain sequence of bits depends on interpretation, of course. But nobody is talking about meaning here, only entropy. For our purpose it wouldn't matter if there were no sentient beings in the universe to attribute any meaning to anything.
You don't need electricity flowing for the light switch to store information. In fact, the light switch could have no spring in it, allowing it to be in an infinity of different states.
So let's imagine a board with two such light switches. I set one to 0.9998128376666.. and the other to 0.26757328888... - out of the infinite number of possibilities, how do we quantify the information that I've just stored in these light switches, to determine how much their weight should have changed?
It's a silly question. It's a bit like saying "If a tree falls in the forest, do birds contain sodium?" Of course the two halves of the question are related tangentially, but putting them together like this is totally meaningless. Oooh... and nests are a thing, so, is it trees falling in the forest that causes nests? (dark matter)
edit: since I have been downvoted, perhaps someone would like to clarify how my description differs from, "taking mass measurements of a digital data storage device when it has full memory. If it has more mass than when the device’s memory is cleared, then that would show the mass-energy-information equivalence is correct."
The article explains why it's not testable.
> For 1Tb device the estimated mass change is 2.5 × 10^-25 Kg.
I don't actually know how precise we're currently able to measure mass, though.
A full SSD will be actually heavier :) but when you think about it the information amount is the same, a SSD with full zeroes and another one full with files have same amount of information equal to capacity of the SSD. Whether it is meaningful information or not is another discussion.
The real question is, how many bits is a human soul?
(To be clear - this is definitely not the explanation for those experimental results. But it's fun to kid around!!)
I hope this is just fuzzification from the usual science journalism process, but I worry there may be some equivocation (in the logical sense) there. What the universe considers "information" and what we consider "information" do not have to be the same thing. They will certainly be related, and as human!information approaches universe!information density, they'd converge, but up here in the macroscopic world there's a lot of daylight between the two.
Consider a simplified cell we use to store a bit, which can either have electrons piled up on one side for a 0, or equally piled up on an equal side for a 1. We humans might consider a drive full of random numbers to be full of information while a drive full of zeros is highly, highly compressible and thus nearly empty of information, but from the universe's point of view, we have exactly the same amount of excess "information" about which electrons are confined where no matter what we humanly store on this drive. That "information" would also constitute far more universe!bits than we could ever dream of storing human!bits on the same drive, while at the same time, not even remotely approaching the level we could hope to measure as mass.
Human!information is a lower bound on universe!information, and not a particularly good one, either.
It seems to me we have a decent grasp on what may constitute a "qubit" and how that may be information, but I've not seen a very solid discussion of what the universe may consider "information" in the arrangement of those qubits. I phrase it as "I've not seen" on purpose, since I'm not in the field. I do know I've seen very far-out speculation like the possibility gravity is somehow related to mass blocking the information flow in the universe in an asymmetric way resulting in a force, but IIRC that still had no discussion on what the information may be, beyond a mere aggregation of qubits. It's obviously there, but we don't know what it is. (Now there's a sentence that makes it sound like dark matter....)
(Thinking about this simplified cell I gave above, my crazy thought would be, if "information" in the universe and "a configuration of mass-energy that maintains its state even though there's a field trying to push it out of the state" (such as the electrons staying in their trap even though they are electrostatically trying to push each other apart) were the same, then there would be a clean mechanism for "information" to "have mass", in the additional potential energies involved. A disorganized mass-energy system where everything is already at the lowest energy would have no information. But this is just crazy talk.)
(on the other hand, I remember lead-acid car batteries are more prone to freezing when discharged)
B and C now can be combined to retrieve the information that was once stored on A. But B and C by themselves are just random sequences of bits. Where is the information, and therefore mass, of A, which still exists in B and C? If it is in one or both of B and C then I can destroy the information (and therefore reduce mass) in one by destroying the other.
[1]: https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-and-governance/our...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon
[2] Charles H. Bennett Demons, Engines and the Second Law from 1987.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/demons-engines-an...
https://ecee.colorado.edu/~ecen4555/SourceMaterial/DemonsEng...
Er... What?
What does it mean to "delete" information here? You put some movies on a usb drive, and then set everything to 0? and see if there's a mass difference? But a string of 0s is still information, no?
A string of zeroes and a random string do have different amount of entropy, so transforming between them requires energy.
The journal has an impact factor of 1.5. For comparison, Science and Nature are in the 40s. This was a cute letter, but it should not have passed peer-review, whether it's open-access or not, because it contributes nothing novel.
[1]: https://researchportal.port.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/melvin-v...
[2]: https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-and-governance/our...
All of which is fine. It just requires a bit more context than the headline yields. If this had linked to his blog, it would make a lot more sense.
Does it speed up? How is momentum conserved?
This is absolutely idiotically bonkers.
Information can be stored with mass, but is not the same as mass. They are not equal. I can't believe anybody is even trying to think up ways to disprove something so momentously bonkers. I mean sure, that's what science does... but buhhhhh
> Experiments have proven the process of deleting a bit of information dissipates heat energy, but after information is created, it can be stored with no energy loss.
To be precise here 'deleting' is a reduction in the number of possible states of a closed system. All '0's or all '1's is not a state of low information. They are both highly ordered states. The state of no information is total randomness, as in heat death. It does require energy to maintain (i.e. keep storing) for information (an ordered state).
And if so that does seem quite unbelievable. Wouldn't that mean that if you had 2 tiny harddrives that both stored the number 3.14, one harddrive happened to store that number after randomly assigning the bits and one harddrive purposely had 3 digits of PI saved on, the one that was purposely storing the number would weigh more?
For HDD's I think I was wrong but there is on the other hand an interaction effect between nearby bits. If nearby magnetic domains try to repel each other it has higher energy.
Create and destroy mass at will on a spacecraft to make some kind of warp drive.
Artificial gravity on a spacecraft.
Create a black hole with information that you can turn on and off.
(obviously not possible with today’s technology. You’d need unbelievably dense information storage mediums)
Photon's stress–energy tensor causes similar effect on gravitational field as tiny amount of mass equivalent to the energy of a photon.
Photon has momentum, zero rest mass. Energy mass equivalence says that you can annihilate mass to create a massless particle. This is true for all the observers.
Relativistic mass is a perceived mass dependent on the observer.