- Mar 2022
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www.popularmechanics.com www.popularmechanics.com
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Melvin Vopson has proposed an experiment involving particle annihilation that could prove that information has mass, and by Einstein's mass-energy equivalence, information is also energy. If true, the experiment would also show that information is one of the states of matter.
The experiment doesn't need a particle accelerator, but instead uses slow positrons at thermal velocities.
Melvin Vopson is an information theory researcher at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom.
A proof that information has mass (or is energy) may explain the idea of dark matter. Vopson's rough calculations indicate that 10^93 bits of information would explain all of the “missing” dark matter.
Vopson's 2022 AIP Advances paper would indicate that the smallest theoretical size of digital bits, presuming they are stable and exist on their own would become the smallest known building blocks of matter.
The width of digital bits today is between ten and 30 nanometers. Smaller physical bits could mean more densely packed storage devices.
Vopson proposes that a positron-electron annihilation should produce energy equivalent to the masses of the two particles. It should also produce an extra dash of energy: two infrared, low-energy photons of a specific wavelength (predicted to be about 50 microns), as a direct result of erasing the information content of the particles.
The mass-energy-information equivalence principle Vopson proposed in his 2019 AIP Advances paper assumes that a digital information bit is not just physical, but has a “finite and quantifiable mass while it stores information.” This very small mass is 3.19 × 1038 kilograms at room temperature.
For example, if you erase one terabyte of data from a storage device, it would decrease in mass by 2.5 × 1025 kilograms, a mass so small that it can only be compared to the mass of a proton, which is about 1.67 × 1027 kilograms.
In 1961, Rolf Landauer first proposed the idea that a bit is physical and has a well-defined energy. When one bit of information is erased, the bit dissipates a measurable amount of energy.
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- Nov 2021
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two one way to explore these questions is to look at how information has changed due to the human mst and one way that it's changed is the 00:46:59 emergence of a fifth level of information dark information which peter talked about before is info that is generated by abiotic computer software and so this information level is only 00:47:13 possible from inscribed language and the technological innovations that that gave rise to that now can generate this kind of information 00:47:24 and there's two key components to dark information one is that it's produced by computer software with no direct human involvement and the second is that from the processes of 00:47:36 input to generated output can't be replicated or feasibly derived by humans so it's inherently dark even if some of the output were able to apply to real world problems 00:47:49 and so this kind of uh information is gaining traction so unsupervised machine learning algorithms are becoming increasingly capable of generating novel algorithms without added human input and 00:48:03 so here are some of the ways that we're currently applying this technology and we it's still in its infancy so we're likely far away from seeing a met where direct information is involved but 00:48:15 this does have the potential for in the future um helping keep humans alive on earth or expanding our niche even further and maybe far down the line seeing something like a 00:48:29 dependence or an inter mutualistic inter-specific mutualism met between biotic life and abiotic technology
It is unexpected to see abiotic cultural artifacts such as dark information be considered in an evolutionary biology context.
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