In the past 24 hours, people uploaded more than 720,000 hours of footage onto YouTube.
According to calculations made a few years ago by University of Portsmouth physicist Melvin Vopson, there is a mass of visual imagery along with half a billion tweets, billions of texts, and every other bit and byte of information we have created.
It is unlikely to be accepted without a lot of evidence. An experiment recently proposed by Vopson based on antimatter explosions could be a way to convince the scientific community that information might not only have mass but that it could also be a strange new state of matter.
Information theory is hard to understand. We can imagine the download of a code of ones and zeros that tells our computer what sounds and images to display, but information might also be applied to non-digital things, such as characteristics that tell particles how to behave.
It's an important factor in describing the amount of order and changes in energy in a system.
Rolf Landauer predicted a minimum change in energy for wiping out information from a system. The implications are profound, linking the loss of information with the emission of heat radiation on a fundamental level.
Experiments over the years showed that there was at least something to the fundamental amount of energy associated with information change.
All of the information we create each and every day contributes a tiny but non-zero amount of mass to the planet.
There would be shocking consequences in the future if the amount of cat videos, Wikipedia entries, and TikTok car singalongs were taken to the extreme. We could run out of material to hold onto all that data, but we could also run out of digital information.
In 350 years, experts think the weight of our digital bits could outweigh the atoms on Earth.
A theory that could change how we calculate mass under certain circumstances could lead to new theories that might give us a better idea of the nature of dark matter.
The hypothesis of detecting the incredibly minute shifts in mass anticipated for today's information-dense storage systems is fun to think about.
A new experiment proposed by Vopson might change that.
If we assume that an electron has a resting energy and a small amount of information about itself, it would emit a predictable spectrum of energy in the spray of photons released on meeting its antimatter counterpart.
The information in an electron is 22 million times smaller than the mass of it, but we can measure it.
When a particle of matter and a particle of antimatter collide, they destroy each other. When the particle is destroyed, the information from it has to go somewhere.
Looking for the specific wavelength of radiation in the destruction of an information-laden electron would tighten connections between information and particles, rather than as part of a broader system.
A new kind of physical state might be found if a fundamental feature of matter is information-based energy.
Not only can atoms unite as solid, they can also flow as liquids and gases, as well as being Bose-Einstein condensates.
The hypothesis will remain controversial until the experiment is conducted. The consequences could be massive if it is true.
The research was published in a journal.
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