Listening Post: How much is that in angels?
Medieval monks were famously prone to speculate on obscure questions such as “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” While a pin is finite, the mystery and majesty of creation is not. The correct answer could be anything. This discussion occupied several centuries of winters in chilly stone cells, without ever reaching a satisfactory conclusion.
Vsauce compares electrons and strawberries.
The impulse to unscrew the inscrutable remains in full force today, but most of the action has moved from theology to science (without losing one iota of obscurity). Strange attractors, dark energy, string theory–all these have been keeping scientists as happy as a monk with a bowl of hot gruel for decades, and have gotten not much farther along than 12th Century “pin theory.”
But some seemingly ineffable questions do have a practical answer, as it turns out. For example, the science folks at Vsauce on Youtube ask “How Much Does the Internet Weigh?” Not the megatons of servers and ipods, cables and routers, monitors and mice–how much does the information weigh?
Using Einstein’s mass/energy conversion equations, the electrons that make up the Internet’s 5 million terabytes of digital data–all those emails, blog posts, pirated movies, piano-playing cat videos, text emoticons, podcasts and public radio archives–have a combined physical mass of about 50 grams, the weight of the garden-variety supermarket strawberry. Now we know. Maybe next they’ll take on the task of measuring the weight of public opinion, or the burden of guilt.
Tags: listeningpost
My only comment on any of this esoteric nonsense is how much I hope no one is paying them anything to come up with this stuff.
Agreed. This is a bloated excuse for real writing. Please stop trying to impress us, Caesar has no clothes. Be honest (in the North Country) and we will respond more favorable. Critical thinking is good, but muddled writing is not. Thanks.
edit “favorably”
Thanks, Dale, for giving me a good chuckle today. Cheers!
love this. one fat strawberry. perfect.
Nice one, Dale.
My science may be faulty, but I think the video got it wrong. It was fun viewing it as a metaphor, but I swear one does not increase the number of electrons to one’s computer when adding information. Nor does one increase the number of electrons in a computer when it’s turned on. Those bytes of memory, whether on disk or in RAM, are already there, with their atoms and of course their orbiting electrons. One merely causes the existing electrons to move (they hop from one atom to another). So adding information to one’s computer or to the Internet will not increase its weight in electrons. Adding another server will, of course, increase the internet’s weight (the video makes the point that they are not counting such increases in “capital,” however). As a matter of fact, the harder a computer works, the hotter it becomes and therefore it might be said one’s computer gets lighter as it works more (all the little air pockets inside heat up and cause lift).
Notwithstanding all those factoids, it was fun viewing the video with the same kind of fantasy with which I enjoy, say, Radiolab. And if anyone can correct my understanding of the weight in electrons of computer circuitry, please have at it!
–Bob F.
Dale
You so frequently come up with a point of view that is so thoughtful and often
humorous.Thanks
Lois C
Dale, The post this week was a lot of fun. Thank you!
I’m usually too busy — I feel too busy — to open the zine. For the second time, your poetic headline made me do it. Thanks.