this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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The idea is that information must have a physical representation. But I don't know how that would lead to a standardized mass of a byte.
No, you missed the point. See @milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee's comment and link to Landauer's Principle, the namesake of which is literally named in the title of the post.
TL;DR: Storing information requires a change in entropy. A change in entropy requires a change in energy. There must be a minimum non-zero amount of energy required for a given quantity of information. Energy is mass due to mass-energy equivalence. ∴ information has mass independent of its physical representation.
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.
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:
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.
I appreciate you spelling some of it out, because I'm just curious and don't have the background knowledge to really navigate this.
Then appreciate it for what it is. A meme.