Information Has Mass • Hacker News Board

Re: Information Has Mass

#21

Post by mmaunder » Sun, Mar 27, 2022, 6:28 PM UTC

ajkjk wrote: post #5

This paper feels very unconvincing. It seems to just assume that there is some intrinsic entropy inside a particle which, by virtue of their annihilation, must be released. I'm fairly sure that is not at all what the Landauer limit is talking about. This cited paper https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0064475 comes up a with a number and says it's intrinsic in each particle, but.. that just seems so sketchy. The…

I also find this absurd:

> The first proposed experiment to test the M/E/I equivalence principle involved the measurement of the mass change in 1 Tb data storage device before and after the digital information is completely erased. At room temperature, the calculated mass change for this experiment is in the order of ∼10−25 kg, making the measurement unachievable with our current technologies.

Erasing 1TB of storage isn't destroying information. It's changing it to store all zeroes or all 1's, or it may simply delete the file allocation table without deleting the data, depending on the erase function used.

What does tickle me though is that if someone is able to prove this, it proves that all mass and energy has information equivalency, which may pave the way to a proof of simulation hypothesis. In a simulation, we would all be information, and information would be perceived as mass or energy.

Re: Information Has Mass

#22

Post by ajkjk » Sun, Mar 27, 2022, 7:24 PM UTC

mmaunder wrote: post #21

ajkjk wrote: post #5

This paper feels very unconvincing. It seems to just assume that there is some intrinsic entropy inside a particle which, by virtue of their annihilation, must be released. I'm fairly sure that is not at all what the Landauer limit is talking about. This cited paper https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0064475 comes up a with a number and says it's intrinsic in each particle, but.. that just seems so sketchy. The…

I also find this absurd: > The first proposed experiment to test the M/E/I equivalence principle involved the measurement of the mass change in 1 Tb data storage device before and after the digital information is completely erased. At room temperature, the calculated mass change for this experiment is in the order of ∼10−25 kg, making the measurement unachievable with our current technologies. Erasing 1TB of storage…

I find the idea that mass and energy are equivalent to information in some way plausible, personally. Just, this paper doesn't offer anything useful on the subject.

For the case of erasing a 1TB storage, I think it's fine to assume an abstract operation with no error correction or internal state. But even still, any wear-and-tear to the drive counts as data as well, and that's going to be incredibly hard to quantify. But if you got past all that, then the idea is that the quantum state of the , if an isolated system, has to put that 1TB of entropy somewhere (since in principle the erasing operation must be reversible), and that it presumably becomes decoherent thermal noise. It's 10^-25 kg of energy _in the form of heat_, not anything useful like discrete photons.

Re: Information Has Mass

#23

Post by thro1 » Mon, Mar 28, 2022, 4:09 PM UTC

Just a warning: professor A Dońda in the book “The Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy” (1973, by Stanislaw Lem) made already an experiment in such matter: while transforming information into mass he reached critical mass - what resulted in the disappearance of the contents of all computer data banks and collapse of human civilization.