"He suggests taking mass measurements of a digital data storage device when it has full memory." I hope this is just fuzzification from the usual science journ

"He suggests taking mass measurements of a digital data storage device when it has full memory." 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.)