All posts by dennis_nelson@att.net

Does Information Have Mass?

This article suggests that the missing mass in the Universe sometimes called Dark Mass and Dark Energy can be accounted for if digital information has mass and this contributes to the total mass of the Universe. This is an interesting speculation.

https://bigthink.com/hard-science/dark-matter-theory/

Claude Shannon used statistical thermodynamics to determine the amount of information that could be transmitted through digital channels. He found that the amount of information that could be transmitted through each channel, i.e. its bandwidth, is inversely proportional to the entropy of the carrier wave, i.e. its photon energy/negentropy. This is why light waves can carry much more information than radio waves. With digital/multiplexed information embedded onto a carrier wave, many more bits of information per second can be transmitted on a high frequency carrier wave than on a low frequency carrier wave. This is because, by nature, a high energy, high frequency photon is much more ordered, i.e., has more negentropy than does a low energy, low frequency photon and so can carry more information per packet.

The interesting point in this theory is that information not only is a form of ordering, i.e. a reversal of entropy, but that information also contains mass and may therefore be a fundamental building block of the Universe not just a characteristic of photons. Does this mean that photons have mass proportional to their information content, i.e. their frequency and negentropy? If a photon has energy and negentropy proportional to its frequency according to the equation E = hv (energy = Planck’s constant X frequency) then it must also have a small amount of mass according to the equation E = mc^2 (mass = energy / speed of light squared.

CO2 Sink in Southern Ocean

The CO2 cycle on earth is clearly more complicated than has been previously understood. It is not just the burning of carbon fuels that is important but also the trapping and sequestering of CO2 by many mechanisms in the environment. This article describes the huge CO2 sink in the southern oceans and its role in removing excess CO2 from the atmosphere.