So if you have an empty memory card compared to one which is full with say 64GB of data (or any other large amount). If you weighed them both on an incredibly sensitive scales, would there be a difference in the weight?
Essentially I’m asking does data/computer memory have any mass?
In: 11
No. Storage is just flipping bits to 1 or 0. Think of it as a light switch, it weighs the same regardless of the position of the switch.
No, not appreciably.
Think of a memory chip as a bunch of levers on a wall. You can raise and lower levers to encode information, but you’re not really changing the mass of the levers, just whether they’re switched on or off.
Due to the fact that the “levers” in this metaphor are transistors, which are switches that are opened and closed using an electrical current (and the thing they’re switching on and off is an electrical circuit) there is a slight increase in mass due to the flow of electrons when the circuit is on. However, this would be like saying the switches in my metaphor became more massive because your hand deposits some oil on the handle. It’s technically correct but kind of missing the point.
Technically, yes. Computer memory works by storing electrons: if a memory bit has electrons, then it’s a 1; and if it has no electrons, then it’s a 0. [Electrons have mass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_mass), and so every bit that’s flipped to 1 by storing electrons will add mass to the memory. However, we’re talking *minuscule* amount of mass, 9.109 x 10^-31 kg per electron, which is so small that even with several billion electrons stored, a human would not be able to tell a difference by picking up the full memory, and it would take an extraordinarily precise scale to detect the difference in weight.
So, technically yes, but for practical purposes, no.
Does finished puzzle weight more than same puzzle pieces in a pile?
Yes, but only technically. Flash memory works by depositing electrons on ‘floating gates’, which would increase the weight by a very tiny amount. However that doesn’t mean data has mass. I mean, think about it. Whether the drive is full or empty it has the same amount of data. ten trillion ones is the same amount of data as ten trillion zeros, when represented individually. Same for any combination. You could create a protocol that uses a *lack* electrons to note a one and the presence of electrons to note a zero, which would mean that writing data to ta disk of all 0’s would cause its weight to *decrease.*
Edit: I’ve been told that flash memory actually does use a charge to represent zero and no charge to represent a one. Neat.
As other comments got to, this depends on your storage technology.
Since flash memory and other “solid state” memory is holding electrons in capacitors to count as a “1”, by filling that 64gb flash drive with 1’s you’re adding the weight of ~ 64 billion electrons to it (if it started at all 0’s, and it is storing a singular electron and not just some level of charge, which I don’t know is the case). However, the weight of 64 billion electrons is 9.05 x 10^-28 grams/electron * 6.4×10^9 electrons for a combined added mass of 5.792 x 10^-18 grams. Or 0.000000000000000005792 grams.
Some rough back-of-the-envelope math tells me that we will need solid state hardware capable of holding roughly tens of thousands of yottabytes (a yottabyte is 2^80 bytes, which is in the neighborhood of 10^24; a gibibyte is 2^30, a gigabyte is 10^9, most storage measures in gibibytes even if they say gigabytes because gibibyte is a more recent term that hasn’t entered widespread usage yet to resolve the ambiguity around whether a gigabyte was 10^9 bytes or 2^30 bites)
However, to this question:
>Essentially I’m asking does data/computer memory have any mass?
The inherent answer is “no” – because historically data has been (and in many places still is) stored on magnetic media that relied on the orientation of a magnetic particle rather than the presence/absence of a particle to indicate a 1 or a 0. Data is an abstraction that we use to build immensely complex things, and inherently an abstraction has no mass, unless the means by which we notate it, encode it, store it, etc – has mass that would change depending on the state of the data being a 1 or 0.
**TL;DR: Yes, but actually no.**
PRE-EMPTIVE edit: I just realized that 64 gibi*bytes* is 8 times as many *bits* which is what the electrons would represent, so multiply by 8 to get a more precise answer, but the short version is that no amount of storage we are likely to get any time soon is going to increase the weight of the device by an appreciable margin by storing all 1’s as opposed to all 0’s.
No. Semiconductor data storage consists of charge transfer…moving a surplus of electrons from one region of a material to another. The transistor arrangement is also complimentary in pairs, which means a logic one would have transistor A “on” and transistor B “off” and logic zero would be A “off” and B “on”.
The total number of electrons stays the same.
Data is stored as a series of ones and zeros. Certainly a hard-drive, being sealed, does not change its weight at all as the data bits are encoded magnetically (the magnetic dipole points one way is a one, the other way is a zero).
Two strawberries is the estimated weight of all of the data on the Internet. Used to be only one strawberry. Progress.
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