Still a more acceptable measurement than “1 cup”.
Information is physical? I’m gonna need a source on that one.
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 @[email protected]’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.
There must be a minimum non-zero amount of energy required for a given quantity of information.
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.
information has mass independent of its physical representation.
So what is the mass of a byte of ‘pure’ information? And how do you derive it?
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:
At room temperature, the Landauer limit represents an energy of approximately 0.018 eV (2.9×10−21 J).
That’s 1 bit, so 1 byte is eight times that, which you can plug into E=mc2 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle
Also see Redjard’s comment to this post
i will Physically bitchslap you then you can deduce yourself the information about whether your face hurts or not, ayy lmao.
At least that’s how I choose to interpret this new information
I’d give a source but it’s physically in my house and it’s heavy
Wouldn’t this make the units temperature-dependent?
Landauer limit is one kTln2 per bit of information, so at 300K about 3 zeptojoule per bit.
Dividing by c² we get 32 micro-quectogram per bit, so 32 yoctogram per terabit. 256 yoctogram per terabyte.
The Author wants half a septillion terabytes, 0.5•10²⁴ terabytes, half a yotta-terabyte.
That makes 128 grams.Since I don’t know what on earth “a cup of flour” is, I can’t judge if the comic character proposes a reasonable conversion, but 0.1kg seems like a reasonable amount to use in cooking.
For baking I would rather have my units temperature dependent than density dependent (I can compact my flour or work with water or nuts, all having different densities, but my room temperature will always be roughly 300).
I endorse einstein-landauer units.184 grams is a touch high for “a cup of flour”, but I’m not gonna check your math, and the comic probably wanted to use “close enough” round-ish numbers. The weight of a cup of flour is usually somewhere between 120g and 145g, going by the conversions used by major baking recipe publishers like King Arthur, Cooks Illustrated, Washington Post, New York Times, etc.
I fear their apartment is at -50°C and this is a cry for help.
At least I am relieved to know that even acclaimed authors native to the cup-measurement system don’t know what “a cup of flour is”.
I’ll be off baking my pannenkoek with 150g of flour then.
I figured it out. Typed the ln2 into my text and then forgot it in the calculator.
Great, I’ma redo alll my numbers then rqMass, not weight! Only because we’re being technical already.
Grams are a measure of mass or weight. I assume we’re talking about measuring this flour here on planet earth, within the effects of its gravitational field lol
At what elevation and where in Earth? 🤔 Again, only being this technical because that’s the tone. Not being pedantic.
The variance involved in converting cups of flour to grams is much greater than any gravitational variances caused by elevation or location. So that’s sort of irrelevant here.
Oh, I disagree, on goofy technical posts like this is exactly the place to worry about it.
That doesn’t work anyway, since based on wheat variety, growing season, and grinding method, different flours have different information density.
Sounds like the culinary world would benefit from having a measurement system that accounts for these factors.
We usually just look at the protein values on the package xD
I like to read bedtime stories to my wheat, so it learns more and has higher information density
They have an international prototype sack of flour in an old missile silo in Kansas. Ultimately that’s what all the measurements are relative to
The real problem is measuring flour by volume instead of mass.
Solve both by measuring with moles
are other burrowing animals also ok?
If you don’t have a mole at home, you can substitute with a gopher.
What about lemmings :-)
You can fit two moles in a liter, but a gopher is too big
Except that moles would only work for counting granules of ground flour, as there is no “flour” molecule. Also, you’d need to have a very accurate measurement of the average mass of a single granule (or you’d need a packing efficiency coefficient and an average granule radius, otherwise you’d have to literally count them. Also, a mole of flour granules would be INSANELY large. 6.02*10^23 of anything larger than a macromolecule is no joke. At this point, since you’d have to weigh it or measure its volume anyway (unless you feel like counting microscopic flour particles for the next few trillion years), you might as well just use grams.
There’s a better way: German flour types. They’re specifying mineral content, e.g. standard “white flour” is Type 405, meaning that when you pyrolyse 100g of flour, 405mg of ashes will be left. As the minerals were all in carbon solution before, and temperatures are low enough to not melt them into slag, you’re essentially left with single atoms. Close enough at least for an assumption. If you disagree I shall hand you a mortar.
Of course, that doesn’t specify everything. I suggest also measuring the released energy, then jot both numbers down on the complex plane. So you have joule-moles of flour.
We have now reached the peak: figure out how much flour you have by burning it to ash, then carefully measure the mass of that to figure out the amount of flour you need.
A mole is just a unit of measure. We typically use it to measure the number of atoms or molecules present. But you can also have a mole of other things.
As a chemistry teacher, I am acutely aware. This is why I suggested that the only “thing” you could measure for flour would be “granules”, the leftover ground bits which make up the substance of the flour. However, a mole of granules would still be insanely large (because you’d have to have 600 sextillion particles of flour, which would take up an insane amount of space) and a mole of any chemical constituent like amylose would be impure, and thus the measure meaningless. The greatest problem still lies in the counting, which would require either nigh-infinite time, or would require a conversion from either mass or volume into moles, so the whole point of using moles becomes moot.
I mean, of course no one would physically count out a mole of something. You don’t physically count out each individual ion in a preparation of acid for your class, you just weigh the constituents and estimate. The joke I made was absurd, in the same vein as the original comic on which we are commenting. No one’s counting five hundred sextillion terabytes, either.
Made even worse by mixing cups, spoons, pints, gallons and their crazy ratios
Metric appears to end at 10^30, but even then, I think the better way to phrase that number would be 5,000 quetta-bytes
Tera = 10^12;
SeptillionSextillion = 10^21
Source*500 000 quettabytes
*Sextillion = 10^21 ( = Zetta)I’d recommend wikipedia here, your source seems to have taken 3 years to update their table and their image is still outdated.
They likely didn’t use quetta because it was only added 3 years ago, and is still not widely known. Or maybe it sounded better.
Derp, that’s what happens when you have to bounce between too many pages on mobile.
Thanks for the pointer!
Hundred sextillion terabytes. Yeah, everybody of calling it hungry sex bites in minutes.
I have absolutely no understanding of whatever is said here
Oh sure, throw a fit — just wait until you want to convert those units to kilojoules!
Who’s laughing now, tablespoons?!
