Comment on Einstein-Landauer culinary units

• vithigar@lemmy.ca ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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  • cholesterol@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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