Information Has Mass
aip.scitation.org
Information Has Mass
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: Information Has Mass
#2The headline is misleading. This paper proposes an experiment to determine if the theory that information has mass is true.
Re: Information Has Mass
#3On the contrary. Take a punch-card, stick it in your 029 keypunch, and add 80 bytes of information to it by typing away. Now it weighs less than when you started. Information has negative mass.
Re: Information Has Mass
#4On the contrary. Take a punch-card, stick it in your 029 keypunch, and add 80 bytes of information to it by typing away. Now it weighs less than when you started. Information has negative mass.
counter example.
consider that instead of punching out the holes, you added an ink blot, the ink is somehow reflective and thus is read by the machine (or whatever).
as the ink has a weight it now weighs more than when you started. Information has regular mass.
hence some prior assumption is mistaken and we could now prove something by contradiction.
now then, somebody please tell me if a proof by contradiction holds in constructive logic.
Re: Information Has Mass
#5This 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 Landauer limit says: since entropy can't be destroyed, if an irreversible computation takes place -- if a bit is 'erased' -- the entropy must be released a heat. Then, using dE = T dS, that change in entropy ought to correspond to a change in energy.
Nowhere in this is it claimed that particles store intrinsic bits of information. It's just talking about data that is modeled in the _state_ of a system. Erasing a bit means collapsing two states of the system into one.
Also, maybe I'm being unfair here, but I'd guess that no paper about entropy that starts with "digital information storage technologies have radically transformed our modern society" is going to end up being good.
Re: Information Has Mass
#6This 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…
"Modelled" is exactly it. It's a mapping of meaning to changes in various states.
Not an expert and I know counterintuitive phenomena exist, but at bottom it makes way more sense that information is the effect of energy, not the cause of mass.
It's a property of energy transfer that incidentally requires you to take into account the existence of some entity to interpret/record/act on it. So how can such a thing as information have mass? Something must be backwards here.
What is information without its receiving entities, be they computers, signal relays, microphones or people? Or hard drives? Just changes in energy that sometimes change mass as well.
Any change in mass you care to measure is bound to change the information inherent in the object. That's the direction of the relationship: The change in mass/energy leads to the information, not the other way around.
For that matter, am I really making a sheet of paper heavier when I run it through a Braille printer? The example of the hard drive doesn't really provide clarity on this.
Re: Information Has Mass
#7I don't see a convincing reason why information conservation would need two additional photons. The author mentions himself in the conclusions that the standard two photons of the annihilation process could carry the additional energy.
Re: Information Has Mass
#8On the contrary. Take a punch-card, stick it in your 029 keypunch, and add 80 bytes of information to it by typing away. Now it weighs less than when you started. Information has negative mass.
It has been said that a punched-card is the least-efficient form of data storage ever invented. The data is stored in the form of holes in the card. The card's only purpose therefore is to hold the holes in place, so it is 100% redundant.
Re: Information Has Mass
#9On the contrary. Take a punch-card, stick it in your 029 keypunch, and add 80 bytes of information to it by typing away. Now it weighs less than when you started. Information has negative mass.
It has been said that a punched-card is the least-efficient form of data storage ever invented. The data is stored in the form of holes in the card. The card's only purpose therefore is to hold the holes in place, so it is 100% redundant.
Interesting perspective. Without the card around them though, the holes don’t exist.
Re: Information Has Mass
#10Can someone explain to me, what actually constitutes that a particle has information or has no information? I.e., what would actually cause a change of this state?
I would expect, that having just 0 or 1 alone would not. Maybe it is related to an observer/environment, i.e. the reduction of the wave superposition to certain possible states...