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.
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!!)
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)
(on the other hand, I remember lead-acid car batteries are more prone to freezing when discharged)
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.
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.)