2 ms·
> He suggests 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, t
by d--b 7y ago
> He suggests 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.
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?
- krastanov 7y agoYeah, as I mentioned in a sibling comment, erasure of data is an irreversible process that (because of thermodynamics) will always create heat (even of everything is a efficient as the laws of the universe permit). That heat is energy and it has mass. It is actually straightforward to prove it would have the same mass as the initial information pattern. A string of zeroes and a random string do have different amount of entropy, so transforming between them requires energy.