Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Information has mass. Not much. Surely charge on a dram capacitor is s bit (oh the pun) of energy and energy is mass.

An excellent example of electron movement is a DC current in a metal plating tank or refining tank. Every atom of aluminum or copper or plated anything took the movement of precisely one electron (simplification because there are some non-electroplating methods for some base/plate combos, but yeah pretty much aluminium is a block of solidified electricity)



So take one RAM stick and another, with the exact same physical makeup (I know this is impossible, but for argument's sake). Now I put some information on the one, and random noise on the other. Both will have different mass, right (because there are different amounts of electrons in the capacitors of both)? Now I put valuable information on one, and I charge all capacitors of the other (so the second one has very information density, because it can be 'compressed' trivially by saying '4GB of high bits'). The second one will be 'heavier' than the first, right? And then I copy something over that second one. It's not like there is a 'transfer' of mass from the other medium to the RAM stack, because there is a net outflow of electrons, right?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: