A scientist has proposed an experiment involving particle annihilation that could establish that information truly has mass. If successful, the experiment could shed light on the mysterious dark matter in our universe-and help us manage the future of data storage. It could also lead to a fundamental shift in how we think about the universe
Vopson proposes that a positron-electron annihilation should produce energy equivalent to the masses of the two particles.
It should also produce an extra dash of energy: two infrared, low-energy photons of a specific wavelength (predicted to be about 50 microns), as a direct result of erasing the information content of the particles.
Beyond Our Earthly Problems
The extra mass of the information contained in the most basic particles can account for the mass of dark matter
- And confirming that information is the fifth state of matter touches on a weird idea: that the universe is actually a computer simulation
- If information is indeed a key component of everything, then perhaps a computer somewhere is running our whole world as a simulation
A New Concept of Matter
The mass-energy-information equivalence principle Vopson proposed in his 2019 AIP Advances paper assumes that a digital information bit-used for digital data storage today-is not just physical, but has a “finite and quantifiable mass while it stores information.”
- If you erase that bit of information, you would lose a tiny amount of mass, and therefore an equivalent amount of energy.
“The Information Catastrophe”
The width of digital bits today is between ten and 30 nanometers, and we can assume that the smaller a physical bit is, the more bits a storage device will hold.
- In about 110 years, we will create more digital bits than all atoms on Earth, a theory researchers call “the information catastrophe.”
