this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
935 points (99.1% liked)

Science Memes

14913 readers
2412 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
935
Einstein-Landauer culinary units (www.smbc-comics.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
89 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

SMBC Comic

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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=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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

That’s all in the linked wikipedia article

I appreciate you spelling some of it out, because I'm just curious and don't have the background knowledge to really navigate this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

Then appreciate it for what it is. A meme.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

Go back to school