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This may be a silly question to some of the scientists here on the board, but I have been wondering this for a while. I know there are hard drive capacities that hold a certain amount of information, but does information itself contain mass? What exactly is information? Is it made of something?
I was reading through the Ender's Game books again and I thought of this. I know light has no mass but still has momentum.
Is this even a valid question? I know data has something to do with the way atoms are being pulled magnetically, and since electrons have mass I thought maybe information would have mass as well.
Posts: 1937 | Registered: Nov 2006
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Well, a hard drive containing information would weigh no more than the same hard drive would weigh without the information.
A book would weigh the same amount if you printed all of the letters in alphabetical order (thus stripping it of most of its information).
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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There are many ways to interpret what is meant by information, but the simple answer is no, information has no mass.
However, information must always be encoded somehow. In the case of hard disk drives, there is a physical platter (often ceramic) that has small regions that can be independently magnetized, representing 1's and 0's. Those 1's and 0's are then arranged in certain ways that can be used to read and write information (by changing them to and from 1's and 0's).
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Information only has mass in the sense that it has to be contained on mass, but it's only the arrangement of the mass that creates information.
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Information does however have energy, in the sense that, to encode a given amount of information in an object, there is a minimum amount of work that must be done on the object. (Or else 2nd thermo is violated through the information-theoretic formulation of entropy.)
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Information does however have energy, in the sense that, to encode a given amount of information in an object, there is a minimum amount of work that must be done on the object. (Or else 2nd thermo is violated through the information-theoretic formulation of entropy.)
The reason I had the question in the first place was for this reason.
I realize that 0's and 1's need to be encoded, and require energy to do this. Since magnetizing a region of a ceramic disk requires energy, I thought that perhaps this would indicate data had a subatomic mass.
I would assume that our brains work the same way. When we hear a piece of information, does our brain use energy to magnetically encode the information onto it?
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Use energy, yes; magnetically, I don't think so; but the principle is the same. This is part of why human brains are the most energy-hungry parts of the body: 5% of the mass, 20% of the energy budget and waste heat.
However, encoding information does not usually increase the mass of the object, because the energy used is radiated away as heat.
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This was an interesting question that I doubt I would have ever thought of. I'm glad you asked something that expanded my mind, and all of you who answered, you expanded my mind as well! Now I'll have to muse on both the questions and answers and see where it all takes me. Fun!
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These thought provoking threads are part of the reason I have lurked here for years. I too shall go ponder this one a little longer!
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I read an interesting article on metaphysics a while ago in which someone posited that the basic unit of matter -- smaller even than the quark -- was in fact the informational bit. It's completely speculative, of course, but it's fun to think that the universe might consist of the information that it exists.
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Anybody know if brain mass increases as knowledge accumulates? I remember hearing that human memory doesn't work like a hard drive (or filing cabinet), so maybe it's more like a book full of random letters that we just put in order to make sense?
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quote:Originally posted by Cookie Crisp: These thought provoking threads are part of the reason I have lurked here for years. I too shall go ponder this one a little longer!
posted
We don't have any more "information" than the neanderthal did. The compilation of observations is stored on paper and hard drives, that have mass.
I suppose you could say that information has mass. Electrons have mass...thought has mass. Difference is, thought can't be shared or accumulated unless stored on a massive object.
Posts: 1495 | Registered: Mar 2009
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We were of course discussing Shannon or Kolmogorov information, which, like 'energy' and 'force', has a specific technical meaning in physics that should not be confused with the colloquial English meaning.
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If I tie a string around my finger as a means of communicating some piece of information, that string does have mass. However, it would be false to say that the string IS the information. The string is merely a way of communicating the information (to myself or to someone else who understands how to convert the physical representation into actual information I intended by it). Hence, the fact that a representation of information has mass does not imply that the information itself has mass.
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You do not understand the distinction between the physics and English meanings of 'information', and should not attempt to discuss the physics kind.
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Or energy. Energy is a relationship between particles, not an independent entity. So while light has energy and thus equivalent mass, it has no mass because that equivalence is always in relationship to other particles. ie How much energy an individual photon has depends on whether an observer is heading toward or away from the light source, and the observer's acceleration (including gravitational). ie The same light can appear as anything between ELFs and gamma rays, depending on the observer's vector (speed and heading) and position in a gravitational field and/or other accelerating frame (eg a spaceship).
Look up Bekenstein entropy and the Holographic Principle for more info regarding information density and the mass of information.
quote:You do not understand the distinction between the physics and English meanings of 'information', and should not attempt to discuss the physics kind.
I assume Geraine was referring to the normal English sort of "information", rather than an academic variation of the concept.
Information (meaning as it is commonly understood by the average person as pieces of data or knowledge) does not have mass - although it is usually encoded in ways requiring mass or energy. But one could think of some pieces of information that are stored in the universe, which we've uncovered, that aren't stored in ways necessarily requiring mass. Certain elements of math, like the value of pi, might fit in that category.
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