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The whole internet 'weighs the same as a strawberry'

Analog

Analog

Lifer
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A mathematician recently calculated that eBook readers 'gain weight' when you add new books to your library - due to the energy 'gained' by electrons when they store information, and the weight of that energy.
Filling a Kindle with books causes it to gain an infinitesimally small amount of mass - so small that it gains 100,000,000 times more when you recharge the battery.

Now a YouTube science channel has used the same mathematics to calculate the mass of the entire internet.
Surprisingly, the whole thing weighs just 50g - around the weight of a single (large) strawberry.
Vsauce says that the 50g figure is the weight of all the electrons in the electricity required to make the internet work - assuming 75-100 million servers supporting the internet, and not including the home PCs running it.
The whole lot equates to around 40billion watts - which weighs in around the same as a plump strawberry.
If you include all the home PCs using the net, the figure is roughly three strawberries.

The weight if you're just counting the data stored in the internet is much less.
It's difficult to quantify how much data there is in the internet - Vsauce used a (dated) estimate by Google's Eric Schmidt.
Schmidt guessed that there were 5,000,000 terabytes of information in the internet - of which Google indexed 0.04 per cent.

The entire weight of that information would work out, Vsauce estimates, to 0.02 millionths of an ounce.

The calculations use Einstein's famous E=MC squared formula, which relates energy to mass.
Electrons which 'store' data in a device have higher energy than electrons which don't - therefore the device weighs more.
The difference in weight in gadgets full of information and 'empty' gadgets is far less than the difference produced by charging the battery, or wiping dust off the screen.
Prof Kubiatowicz's findings about Kindles 'gaining weight' are based on the fact that, while downloading an e-book does not change the number of electrons in an e-reader, those electrons holding data have a higher level of energy.


The relationship between energy and mass - famously summarised by Einstein as E=mc2 - means that those with a higher energy also have a higher mass.

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That's interesting, but I'm a little confused. Isn't empty space (on hard drives and flash memory and so on) just filled with a bunch of zeroes? If you randomize the data on a storage device, there will be ones and zeroes at random, indicated by magnetic dipoles or whatever they're called. So how would a storage device gain weight if you organize the data?

It seems like the study looks at the mass of all of the electrons used across all storage devices in the world, and only counts the mass of ones that are "in use." But putting data on a device isn't really adding mass, it's just reorganizing existing data, thus making use of more electrons and thus "increasing" the mass. But it's not REALLY increasing the mass - the same number of electrons are there before and after.

But maybe I'm missing something. I'm not an engineer by any stretch.

EDIT: Thinking about it more, it's sort of like weighing all the cars in the world vs. weighing all the unassembled car parts. As more cars are assembled from component parts, the total weight of all the cars in the world increases, but it's not like extra mass is being created, it's just organized into a more ordered form.
 
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it's just pointless trivia. If you took all those electron and put them in a room, you wouldn't have the interent. You have to take the hardware into account too.
 
AstroManLuca said:
That's interesting, but I'm a little confused. Isn't empty space (on hard drives and flash memory and so on) just filled with a bunch of zeroes? If you randomize the data on a storage device, there will be ones and zeroes at random, indicated by magnetic dipoles or whatever they're called. So how would a storage device gain weight if you organize the data?

It seems like the study looks at the mass of all of the electrons used across all storage devices in the world, and only counts the mass of ones that are "in use." But putting data on a device isn't really adding mass, it's just reorganizing existing data, thus making use of more electrons and thus "increasing" the mass. But it's not REALLY increasing the mass - the same number of electrons are there before and after.

But maybe I'm missing something. I'm not an engineer by any stretch.
Click to expand...

I forget TTL but in CMOS at 5 volt standards for transistors, a low or 0 uses 0.7 volts and a high or 1 uses at least 4.3 volts. Anything in between is undefined.

I am also pretty sure modern computer transistors arent on 5 volts anymore. Probably like 1 microvolt or less. But I still dont know how this guy accurately calculated the whole internet. I think the article is BS which will impress folks who dont know anything about chemistry or electricity or computers or the internet.
 
agreed. I'm not going to claim to be any great physicist, chemist, or even own a compter engineering degree, but when I add a file to my computer, I'm just re-arranging the 1s and 0s on the platters of the HDD (or memory). To gain mass, I'd have to add something to the platter.
 
AstroManLuca said:
That's interesting, but I'm a little confused. Isn't empty space (on hard drives and flash memory and so on) just filled with a bunch of zeroes? If you randomize the data on a storage device, there will be ones and zeroes at random, indicated by magnetic dipoles or whatever they're called. So how would a storage device gain weight if you organize the data?
Click to expand...

wait a minute are you saying ones have more mass than zeros? :sneaky:
 
And like a strawberry, all the productive parts of the internet are on the surface. Once you look below the surface, it is nothing but flesh.
 
AstroManLuca said:
That's interesting, but I'm a little confused. Isn't empty space (on hard drives and flash memory and so on) just filled with a bunch of zeroes? If you randomize the data on a storage device, there will be ones and zeroes at random, indicated by magnetic dipoles or whatever they're called. So how would a storage device gain weight if you organize the data?

It seems like the study looks at the mass of all of the electrons used across all storage devices in the world, and only counts the mass of ones that are "in use." But putting data on a device isn't really adding mass, it's just reorganizing existing data, thus making use of more electrons and thus "increasing" the mass. But it's not REALLY increasing the mass - the same number of electrons are there before and after.

But maybe I'm missing something. I'm not an engineer by any stretch.

EDIT: Thinking about it more, it's sort of like weighing all the cars in the world vs. weighing all the unassembled car parts. As more cars are assembled from component parts, the total weight of all the cars in the world increases, but it's not like extra mass is being created, it's just organized into a more ordered form.
Click to expand...

From what I understand, dipoles themselves realign depending on the orientation of the Electric Field which the electron cloud moves away (slightly) from the center position of an atom. The energy required to store a constant positive voltage (a 1 bit if you will, that distance from the center of the atom the cloud moves) might be what the scientist was measuring, but I'm not sure. *shrug*
 
Schmidt guessed that there were 5,000,000 terabytes of information in the internet - of which Google indexed 0.04 per cent

Doesn't that seem extremely low?


anyway, I think that's pretty damn cool. you guys are party poopers
 
How about data/files in Usenet servers? I wonder if he took that into account, lots of porn there being uploaded daily. :awe:
 
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