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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • So what is the mass of a byte of ‘pure’ information? And how do you derive it?

    That’s all in the linked wikipedia article, but since you asked:

    At room temperature, the Landauer limit represents an energy of approximately 0.018 eV (2.9×10−21 J).

    That’s 1 bit, so 1 byte is eight times that, which you can plug into E=mc2 to get its absurdly small equivalent mass.

    It’s important(?) to note that Landauer’s Principle is not settled science and has yet to be rigorously proven, unless there’s some recent development which the comic is referencing. I haven’t checked.


  • No, you missed the point. See @milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee’s comment and link to Landauer’s Principle, the namesake of which is literally named in the title of the post.

    TL;DR: Storing information requires a change in entropy. A change in entropy requires a change in energy. There must be a minimum non-zero amount of energy required for a given quantity of information. Energy is mass due to mass-energy equivalence. ∴ information has mass independent of its physical representation.







  • You joke, but I’m missing a nail on one of my big toes and it’s so much more comfortable and less hassle that I kind of wish all my toenails were gone.

    …not so sure about fingernails though. They’re pretty useful for picking things up or praying things open.