How to Convert Bytes to Grams
thatxliner.github.io
thatxliner.github.io
The "natural" way to convert bits to grams (ie not based on any specific technology) would be to combine Landauer's Principle and Mass-energy equivalence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle
However even then, you still have to choose a temperature (eg STP) which is ultimately an arbitrary choice.
Another angle might be to look at the Bekenstein bound, i.e. that if you have a physical system of mass-energy m, there's a maximal number of bits B that it can contain. Though that also would need a system-containing volume (surface area?) which would also be arbitrary.
Where a feather's weight is measured in grams, a feather is 0.4 * 10^21 times the weight of PrismJS, or a feather weighs (a lot) more. So their claim is true.
Interestingly enough, the same applies to electric cars. Full car batteries weigh an infinitesimally larger amount than empty ones. For a 50 kWh Tesla, we're looking at 1.8 nanograms. Which for a battery pack that weighs 324Kg (~750 lb) is less than a rounding error.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/34421/does-the-m....
Is that actually true? Does the battery (as a whole) have a different number of electrons than the number of protons? If I brought a negatively charged chunk of material near the battery, would it require more force to move it closer to the battery when the battery is charged (because by what you're saying, a charged battery has more electrons in it)?
https://langa.com/index.php/2019/08/29/yes-your-hdds-and-ssd...
A sheet of A4 paper 80 gr/m2 weights 5 grams, easier.
Back to the link, I lost the Author when he uses the "i" and Times New Roman, I would have found the experiment more meaningful if he used a fixed spaced font and thus could print something more than i's, and then there is the issue about non-printable characters, if you really want to "print" a program you will need hex, which would at least double the weight of a byte.
Eg. a 1TB USB flash (casing removed as long it's operational), vs a microSD card vs a NVMe SSD vs a SATA SSD vs a hard drive vs a CD/DVD/BlueRay vs RAM chips...
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If we take the un-punched card as baseline then we could say that all of the bytes 0x00 to 0xFF have negative weight except one. Presumably the 0x00 would be zero weight byte, as it damn well should! ;), and all of the other bytes would have various amounts of negative weights.
Now I want a punch card computer.
I’d go further, figure out the theoretical maximum amount of information that can be stored in a gram of matter and use that. If we’re trying to make a lasting standard then let’s avoid specific storage mediums that may eventually be outdated.
Interestingly, this prior HN post nibbles at the question but doesn’t get into what the composition of the volume would need to be to achieve the density they talk about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6466430
They are massless but have finite energy, which is the flip side of the same coin; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalenc....
> Would they gain mass based on whether they encoded a message?
They already do encode something. Whether that's message or noise, depends on other parts of the information system that creates/processes those photons, and it is in those parts that the variable costs will be incurred.
In a HDD charge isn't obviously involved; the data is represented by magnetic patterns on the surface of each spinning platter. Ultimately those also represent data by movements of charge, though: charge naturally orbiting around atoms creates the magnetic fields, and the data is represented by the orientation of those orbits.
So a drive of either kind full of byte 254 contains about the same charge as one that's zeroed out.
They don't have exactly the same mass though, and therefore have slightly different weight, even if they contain identical charge. That's because mass (and weight) doesn't just come from matter. It also comes from the potential energy of different patterns of charge or their orbits, pushing and pulling on each other. It's counter-intuitive that things merely pushing and pulling on each other create mass just by their configuration, and that the mass changes when their configuration changes. But it's true, assuming the theory of relativity is true (it seems to be). That said, the mass created by the configuration of forces is very small indeed. Your SSD or HDD probably changes mass by a very much larger amount in a short time just by existing, giving off or absorbing minute quantities of gases from the air, acquiring dust, and other natural physical changes as the materials age.
/playful