Yes, I understand that work is involved, but the energy involved in storing and altering information is not the mass equivalence this paper is talking about. Th

Yes, I understand that work is involved, but the energy involved in storing and altering information is not the mass equivalence this paper is talking about. That is a separate question Vopson addresses, the one which ignores the economic factors, and the one that relies on simple mass-energy equivalence. It's some supposed "information catastrophe" that just isn't possible. But the radical claim of this paper, and the one I am addressing, is that information, in and of itself, contributes a mass component to a storage media regardless of the media involved. That's a completely different proposition. All baryonic matter has an information component. But the theorems concerning information stipulate that information is never destroyed. Entropy does not destroy it either. This paper violates the central theorem of information science. That is why "erased" here is meaningless. Entropy state is irrelevant. Further, it violates the conservation of mass-energy. The work required to "erase" a given medium is the same as the work required to record information on it. Yet this paper claims the one process adds mass, and the other removes it. The whole thing is just nonsense.