{"id":1657,"date":"2011-11-10T15:02:30","date_gmt":"2011-11-10T20:02:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/?p=1657"},"modified":"2011-11-11T10:36:48","modified_gmt":"2011-11-11T15:36:48","slug":"listening-post-how-much-is-that-in-angels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/2011\/11\/10\/listening-post-how-much-is-that-in-angels\/","title":{"rendered":"Listening Post: How much is that in angels?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Vsauce compares electrons and strawberries.<\/p><\/div>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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?<\/a>” Not the megatons of servers and ipods, cables and routers, monitors and mice–how much does the information<\/em> weigh?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Medieval monks were famously prone to speculate on obscure questions such as “How many angels […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6128],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1657"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1657"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1659,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1657\/revisions\/1659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}