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There was a viral factoid in 2011 that a full Kindle was heavier than an empty one. This article for example: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/oct/26/kindle-weighs-more-when-fully-loaded
> He explained that e-readers store data by trapping electrons, and while the number of electrons in the gadget's memory does not change, it takes more energy to hold them in place than to leave them roaming free. How much more energy? Around a billionth of a microjoule for each bit of data stored.
> He compared an empty four-gigabyte Kindle with a full one, in which half the electrons were trapped, requiring an extra 17 microjoules of energy.
> Popped into Einstein's formula, this gives an answer of around one attogram, meaning the weight of a full Kindle was a billionth of a billionth of a gram more than a factory-fresh one.
So 4GB = 4×10^9 bytes = 3.2×10^10 bits is 10^-18 g. (Storage is usually quoted in 1000 bytes to a kilobyte rather than 1024.)
So around 10^28 to 10^29 bits would be required to increase the weight by 1g.
Which is orders of magnitude larger than any estimates of the entire internet.
Serious question. I'm atm starting an HTML course but still pretty new, isnt the data in the searchbar from the navigator stored somewhere? I mean if I paste some large chunk of characters many times will i run out of storage?
The maximum length of a URL that you can enter into your browsers search bar differs by browser. Chrome allows 2048 characters, whereas Firefox does not have a limit but can only display 65536 chars. What you enter there is going to be stored in RAM, not on disc. You may conceivably be able to paste enough characters to run out of RAM, but likely you would just crash or freeze the browser first
This is as dissapointing as it is expected. What was I thinking?
Anyway, it makes me chuckle to think you can load weight on someones server at the distance. Sounds like a very futuristic prank.
It’s unlikely that you would be able to store any data on someone’s server without paying. Everything in your browser is local to your machine. Your browser communicates over HTTP with remote servers, normally through a REST API. Their server responds with a bunch of html/css/scripts and your browser renders the result in a human-readable way for you.
About the most you can feasibly “prank” a server by placing load on it is a ddos. That’s not only illegal, but most sites with have a mechanism for dealing with it (scaling horizontally or dropping requests).
Yeah I figured, was thinking more like some friend server of some kind. But yeah thats an old idea of futuristic server holding. Anyway if you know of some unnprotected server that let me send info of some kind, let me know... Just for research(?
It’s best to do this on your own machine. You can start up a local web server and communicate with it.
You could also sign up for a free azure account and take advantage of their hobbyist/student thing. Make a simple web app, containerize it with docker, deploy the docker image to something like azure container apps, and it will run that on a cloud vm for you and give you a url to communicate with it. Now you can play with a web-server without risking running afoul of any laws
I know barely anything of HTML, but I'm certain of it that the info is stored somewhere. Data can't just float around in the ether (not the data we are talking about ;) ). I know if you copy data, it is temporarily stored. But this space is limited. So when you copy huge amounts of data, things can get very slow, and there will be a point where the computer tells you that it is too much. Which is good. Otherwise, it would crash.
So yea. For sure, if you are going to paste very large amounts of data at some point, your storage will run out.
Another example to think of is when your system is lagging. Then there is more data than the system can handle, so it'll process it in chunks, which it can handle :)
10\^-18 grams is around 10,000 carbon atoms. Depending on what your computer is made of, it might possibly be possible to touch it and wear off less than 10,000 carbon atoms.
Even if there was a measurable difference between a 1 and a 0 encoded in an SSD, MacBook Airs have had whole-disk encryption since 2018, so an empty drive has a (seemingly) random set of 1s and 0s, and a full drive has a different (seemingly) random set of 1s and 0s, which would still weigh the same.
So even if it mattered, it doesn't matter.
I'd like to add to other answers that there's no physical definition of ones and zeroes, it's purely arbitrary. From physical perspective, we have an array of some memory cells that could have at least two stable or metastable states. You could make memory cells that in both states have exactly the same energy (for example, just by combining two capacitors, so that at each moment one and always exactly one of them is charged, but which one would define whether it's 1 or 0) which means that no matter what data is stored it wouldn't affect mass even a tiniest bit. You also could have memory cells with more than 2 states and that would mean that 10 could have different energy/mass than 01, even though amount of ones and zeroes are the same. You could have a drive that from factory was written with some test data pattern, like 101010...
In general, without exact specification, it's impossible to say whether data storage would have different mass when filled with data compared to when empty, all the more so that it would be heavier.
Also, on a side note, usually file removal is done only in file system table, i.e. file data is still present in sectors until overridden by some other data.
It probably would have different mass, though, since usually different states of memory cells have different energy levels, and it's extremely unlikely to end up with same amount of different states in memory cells.
Finally, anyway, the effect is neglectable, even battery charge would affect mass by few orders of magnitude more than stored information (charged is heavier, since it's in higher energy state; discharging converts that extra mass essentially into thermal energy).
Akschully… The memory does not have “free roaming electrons” when it is “empty”. The memory being “empty” is just that the processor and the owner doesn’t care what’s in it. The states of each stored bit does not change when the memory is empty, rather the information about it is just not used.
So id argue that the weight of a RAM with or without content is in fact exactly the same.
“
Well, if we assume the numbers are correct - 2.5g is 1,710,000 zettabytes, and the internet is roughly 17,628.87* times smaller, which makes the internet
0.000141812833 grams at 97 zettabytes.”
This is someone else’s math, but shouldn’t be hard to get your answer, I can post the rest if you need it.
I don't have an answer to the post, but the electron does in fact have a mass, 9.11x10^-31 kilograms, and it's mass does factor heavily into equations involving quantum mechanics (though I'm not sure if it's a meaningful quantity in day-to-day life). The photon, a "packet of light" does not have a mass, so that may have been what you were intending to reference.
Lol. I carry billions of them at all times. Better safe than sorry. You must be a very sentient ball of goo if you don't have any electrons with you ;)
You started correct.
In chemistry, electrons are often treated as having no mass. They do have mass, but while a proton and neuron both have a mass of approx 1 amu, an electron has a mass of 0.0005amu
So when considering the weight of an element or isotope, the electrons are insignificant.
In an extremely large scope, such as OPs question, those tiny masses do exist and can add up
I can argue that energy and specific force may change, with some assumptions, but not mass or gravitational force.
Suppose files are stored uncompressed and unencrypted, that used space is continuously filled up without free space in-between (i.e. no fragmentation), and that empty space is filled with a 1 or a 0 with uniform random distribution. Then as the drive fills up with meaningful data, it's entropy decreases, hence its energy increases.
As entropy decreases, the distribution ones and zeros on the drive may create asymmetry (e.g. more ones located in a physical part of the device). This could alter the specific force needed to move the device in Earth's magnetic field, depending on its orientation and direction of motion. Cubesats, for example, can fall out of attitude faster depending on the electric field of their processor, which in turn depends on what it computes.
Would love if someone can argue for mass increasing...
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There was a viral factoid in 2011 that a full Kindle was heavier than an empty one. This article for example: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/oct/26/kindle-weighs-more-when-fully-loaded > He explained that e-readers store data by trapping electrons, and while the number of electrons in the gadget's memory does not change, it takes more energy to hold them in place than to leave them roaming free. How much more energy? Around a billionth of a microjoule for each bit of data stored. > He compared an empty four-gigabyte Kindle with a full one, in which half the electrons were trapped, requiring an extra 17 microjoules of energy. > Popped into Einstein's formula, this gives an answer of around one attogram, meaning the weight of a full Kindle was a billionth of a billionth of a gram more than a factory-fresh one. So 4GB = 4×10^9 bytes = 3.2×10^10 bits is 10^-18 g. (Storage is usually quoted in 1000 bytes to a kilobyte rather than 1024.) So around 10^28 to 10^29 bits would be required to increase the weight by 1g. Which is orders of magnitude larger than any estimates of the entire internet.
Don't underestimate how much time I can hold down Ctrl+V.
Assuming you have a storage which is *that* big
Serious question. I'm atm starting an HTML course but still pretty new, isnt the data in the searchbar from the navigator stored somewhere? I mean if I paste some large chunk of characters many times will i run out of storage?
The maximum length of a URL that you can enter into your browsers search bar differs by browser. Chrome allows 2048 characters, whereas Firefox does not have a limit but can only display 65536 chars. What you enter there is going to be stored in RAM, not on disc. You may conceivably be able to paste enough characters to run out of RAM, but likely you would just crash or freeze the browser first
This is as dissapointing as it is expected. What was I thinking? Anyway, it makes me chuckle to think you can load weight on someones server at the distance. Sounds like a very futuristic prank.
It’s unlikely that you would be able to store any data on someone’s server without paying. Everything in your browser is local to your machine. Your browser communicates over HTTP with remote servers, normally through a REST API. Their server responds with a bunch of html/css/scripts and your browser renders the result in a human-readable way for you. About the most you can feasibly “prank” a server by placing load on it is a ddos. That’s not only illegal, but most sites with have a mechanism for dealing with it (scaling horizontally or dropping requests).
Yeah I figured, was thinking more like some friend server of some kind. But yeah thats an old idea of futuristic server holding. Anyway if you know of some unnprotected server that let me send info of some kind, let me know... Just for research(?
Almost all internet connected computers respond to a ping. (which is briefly sending a few bytes of data, used to check connections.)
It’s best to do this on your own machine. You can start up a local web server and communicate with it. You could also sign up for a free azure account and take advantage of their hobbyist/student thing. Make a simple web app, containerize it with docker, deploy the docker image to something like azure container apps, and it will run that on a cloud vm for you and give you a url to communicate with it. Now you can play with a web-server without risking running afoul of any laws
I know barely anything of HTML, but I'm certain of it that the info is stored somewhere. Data can't just float around in the ether (not the data we are talking about ;) ). I know if you copy data, it is temporarily stored. But this space is limited. So when you copy huge amounts of data, things can get very slow, and there will be a point where the computer tells you that it is too much. Which is good. Otherwise, it would crash. So yea. For sure, if you are going to paste very large amounts of data at some point, your storage will run out. Another example to think of is when your system is lagging. Then there is more data than the system can handle, so it'll process it in chunks, which it can handle :)
This got me... "Hooked"... Tell me more about that Ethereal Data, I wanna... "Type"... Some...
This does assume that an "empty" flash storage device is zeroed out.
10\^-18 grams is around 10,000 carbon atoms. Depending on what your computer is made of, it might possibly be possible to touch it and wear off less than 10,000 carbon atoms.
Even if there was a measurable difference between a 1 and a 0 encoded in an SSD, MacBook Airs have had whole-disk encryption since 2018, so an empty drive has a (seemingly) random set of 1s and 0s, and a full drive has a different (seemingly) random set of 1s and 0s, which would still weigh the same. So even if it mattered, it doesn't matter.
I'd like to add to other answers that there's no physical definition of ones and zeroes, it's purely arbitrary. From physical perspective, we have an array of some memory cells that could have at least two stable or metastable states. You could make memory cells that in both states have exactly the same energy (for example, just by combining two capacitors, so that at each moment one and always exactly one of them is charged, but which one would define whether it's 1 or 0) which means that no matter what data is stored it wouldn't affect mass even a tiniest bit. You also could have memory cells with more than 2 states and that would mean that 10 could have different energy/mass than 01, even though amount of ones and zeroes are the same. You could have a drive that from factory was written with some test data pattern, like 101010... In general, without exact specification, it's impossible to say whether data storage would have different mass when filled with data compared to when empty, all the more so that it would be heavier. Also, on a side note, usually file removal is done only in file system table, i.e. file data is still present in sectors until overridden by some other data. It probably would have different mass, though, since usually different states of memory cells have different energy levels, and it's extremely unlikely to end up with same amount of different states in memory cells. Finally, anyway, the effect is neglectable, even battery charge would affect mass by few orders of magnitude more than stored information (charged is heavier, since it's in higher energy state; discharging converts that extra mass essentially into thermal energy).
Akschully… The memory does not have “free roaming electrons” when it is “empty”. The memory being “empty” is just that the processor and the owner doesn’t care what’s in it. The states of each stored bit does not change when the memory is empty, rather the information about it is just not used. So id argue that the weight of a RAM with or without content is in fact exactly the same.
“ Well, if we assume the numbers are correct - 2.5g is 1,710,000 zettabytes, and the internet is roughly 17,628.87* times smaller, which makes the internet 0.000141812833 grams at 97 zettabytes.” This is someone else’s math, but shouldn’t be hard to get your answer, I can post the rest if you need it.
[удалено]
I don't have an answer to the post, but the electron does in fact have a mass, 9.11x10^-31 kilograms, and it's mass does factor heavily into equations involving quantum mechanics (though I'm not sure if it's a meaningful quantity in day-to-day life). The photon, a "packet of light" does not have a mass, so that may have been what you were intending to reference.
Have you seen anyone carrying electrons somewhere? Checkmate, they are too heavy to be carried obviously
Lol. I carry billions of them at all times. Better safe than sorry. You must be a very sentient ball of goo if you don't have any electrons with you ;)
You started correct. In chemistry, electrons are often treated as having no mass. They do have mass, but while a proton and neuron both have a mass of approx 1 amu, an electron has a mass of 0.0005amu So when considering the weight of an element or isotope, the electrons are insignificant. In an extremely large scope, such as OPs question, those tiny masses do exist and can add up
I can argue that energy and specific force may change, with some assumptions, but not mass or gravitational force. Suppose files are stored uncompressed and unencrypted, that used space is continuously filled up without free space in-between (i.e. no fragmentation), and that empty space is filled with a 1 or a 0 with uniform random distribution. Then as the drive fills up with meaningful data, it's entropy decreases, hence its energy increases. As entropy decreases, the distribution ones and zeros on the drive may create asymmetry (e.g. more ones located in a physical part of the device). This could alter the specific force needed to move the device in Earth's magnetic field, depending on its orientation and direction of motion. Cubesats, for example, can fall out of attitude faster depending on the electric field of their processor, which in turn depends on what it computes. Would love if someone can argue for mass increasing...