Does much does electronic information weight?
I seem to be in a great pseudo-intellectual sprint these days … So I have been wondering about this one for a while … does electronic information have a physical weight … and if so … would it be environmentally better to write shorter emails, webpages, facebook status, linkedin profiles and so forth?
I guess that more information (in bytes) means more web traffic, takes more space on your hard drive and/or in RAM, takes longer to read, which means your monitor is on for longer and so forth. Essentially all these things lead to more use of electricity, which potentially means more damage to the environment. However the question still remains … does electronic information have a physical weight … will my computer be a nano-gram heavier – if I have LOTS of mails and programs open – contrary to a few?
As an electronic technician I’d say that electronic information has no weight. Why? Well, some could argue that every single electron has a specific weight (that’s right: 10^-31 kg), but those electrons are part of a printed circuit or integrated circuit anyway, they just move when an electronic impulse starts to make its way through an electronic circuit. If you save information on a hard-disk, the molecular magnets will be polarized. But just like the electrons, the molecular magnets are already there.
So don’t worry, you can open as many mails as you want to and your computer won’t break through the floor and land in the basement.
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Well, since relativity states that energy is equivalent to mass, when you have your computer running it should weigh more than when it is off. The information itself doesn’t weigh more than “no information” though, it is the processing of information that adds weight. Tiny, tiny amounts.