Mass is Information, Information is Mass?
JoeMerchant writes:
Digital Data Could Be Altering Earth's Mass Just a Tiny Bit, Claims Physicist
According to calculations made a few years ago by University of Portsmouth physicist Melvin Vopson, the literal mass of visual imagery created daily - along with half a billion tweets, countless texts, billions of WhatsApp messages, and every other bit and byte of information we've created - could be making our planet a touch heavier. An experiment recently proposed by Vopson based on antimatter explosions might go some way in convincing the scientific community that information might not only have mass but that it could also be a strange new state of matter, or (of course) the elusive dark matter needed to balance most cosmological observations today.
Scientist says that dark matter may be information itself
"If we assume that information is physical and has mass, and that elementary particles have a DNA of information about themselves, how can we prove it?" Vopson asked in the release. "My latest paper is about putting these theories to the test so they can be taken seriously by the scientific community."
Vospon suggests an experiment that could test the hypothesis that information is a distinct state of matter - alongside solids, liquids, gases and plasmas - by using a particle-antiparticle collision to, in theory, "erase" information from the universe.
"It doesn't contradict quantum mechanics, electrodynamics, thermodynamics or classical mechanics," he said in the release. "All it does is complement physics with something new and incredibly exciting."
Reference:
Melvin M. Vopson, Experimental protocol for testing the mass-energy-information equivalence principle [open], AIP Adv., 12, 3, 2022.
DOI: 10.1063/5.0087175
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Had enough of trying to formulate the grand unification theory? Have a try at lumping another theory on the pile to see if that makes it better! Is Maxwell's Demon creating mass with every action?
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