Go back to school
Comment on Einstein-Landauer culinary units
cholesterol@lemmy.world 1 day agoThere 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?
kevin2107@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
vithigar@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
That’s all in the linked wikipedia article, but since you asked:
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.
cholesterol@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
I appreciate you spelling some of it out, because I’m just curious and don’t have the background knowledge to really navigate this.
kevin2107@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Then appreciate it for what it is. A meme.