Comment on Einstein-Landauer culinary units

HawlSera@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• cholesterol@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The idea is that information must have a physical representation. But I don’t know how that would lead to a standardized mass of a byte.

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  • vithigar@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    No, you missed the point. See @milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee’s comment and link to Landauer’s Principle, the namesake of which is literally named in the title of the comic.

    TL;DR: Storing information requires a change in entropy. A change in entropy requires a change in energy. There must be a minimum non-zero amount of energy required for a given quantity of information. Energy is mass due to mass-energy equivalence. ∴ information has mass.

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    • lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      When referencing another person’s comment, it can be helpful to link to that comment or the article you mentioned.

      I’d also like to point out that many Wikipedia articles, particularly those written by experts on a given scientific subject, tend to be daunting rather than helpful for people not yet familiar with that subject.

      Explanations like the one you offered in this comment and the next reply can help make topics more approachable, so I very much appreciate that.

      To illustrate my point:

      In this case, the article first describes the principle as “pertaining to a lower theoretical limit of energy consumption of computation”, which doesn’t directly highlight the connection to information storage. The next sentence then mentions “irreversible change in information” and “merging two computational paths”, both of which are non-trivial.

      From a brief glance at the article on reversible computing linked further on, I gather that “irreversible” here doesn’t mean “you can’t flip the bit again” but rather something like “you can’t deterministically figure out the previous calculation from its result”, so the phrase boils down to “storing a piece of information” for our context. The example of “merging computational paths” probably has no particular bearing on the energy value of information either and can be ignored as well.

      Figuring out the resulting logic that you so kindly laid out – again, thank you for that! – requires a degree of subject-specific understanding to know what parts of the explanation can be safely ignored.

      Of course, experts want to be accurate and tend to think in terms they’re familiar with, so I don’t fault them for that. The unfortunate result is that their writings are often rather intransparent to laypeople and linking to Wikipedia articles isn’t always the best way to convey an understanding.

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    • cholesterol@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      There must be a minimum non-zero amount of energy required for a given quantity of information.

      Okay, but I still don’t get how that leads to a standardized measure of energy/mass for a given amount of bytes. That seems to be the premise of the comic.

      information has mass independent of its physical representation.

      So what is the mass of a byte of ‘pure’ information? And how do you derive it?

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      • vithigar@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        So what is the mass of a byte of ‘pure’ information? And how do you derive it?

        That’s all in the linked wikipedia article, but since you asked:

        At room temperature, the Landauer limit represents an energy of approximately 0.018 eV (2.9×10^−21^ J).

        That’s 1 bit, so 1 byte is eight times that, which you can plug into E=mc^2^ to get its absurdly small equivalent mass.

        It’s important(?) to note that Landauer’s Principle is not settled science and has yet to be rigorously proven, unless there’s some recent development which the comic is referencing. I haven’t checked.

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      • kevin2107@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Go back to school

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• Natanael@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Entropy in information theory is equivalent to entropy in quantum dynamics

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  • noride@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Image

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• kameecoding@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  i will Physically bitchslap you then you can deduce yourself the information about whether your face hurts or not, ayy lmao.

  At least that’s how I choose to interpret this new information

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• milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle

  Also see Redjard’s comment to this post

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• LanguageIsCool@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I’d give a source but it’s physically in my house and it’s heavy

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• Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Information is physical?

  Information only exists in the world in the form of physical media, such as computer circuits, DNA or electrical/neuron pattern in your brain.

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  • Honytawk@feddit.nl ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Pretty sure math is intrinsic to the universe and wasn’t written down anywhere until we discovered it.

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    • Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      That depends on which side of “math is an invention” or “math was discovered” you fall into.

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  • HawlSera@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Okay, true, but that’s not the situation described in the comic.

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