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Einstein-Landauer culinary units (www.smbc-comics.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by green_copper@kbin.earth to c/science_memes@mander.xyz

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[-] cholesterol@lemmy.world 2 points 2 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?

[-] vithigar@lemmy.ca 17 points 2 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.