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Raymond Chen (of The Old New Thing blog) recently linked to a post… - 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

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Thomas

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[Tuesday 30th June 2009 at 10:15 pm]

Thomas

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Raymond Chen (of The Old New Thing blog) recently linked to a post asking, "How much does a gigabyte weigh?" The original poster had gotten confused (or is an excellent troll) and thought that as he installed stuff on his laptop it actually got heavier. Obviously that's not the case.

But it got me wondering. Does reading from or writing to something actually change the mass of it? See, if you apply a charge to something you do actually change the mass of it by a really tiny amount, as you're adding or removing electrons from the object. This probably means that flash memory will actually get heavier as you write to it, since it stores binary ones by trapping a charge on the chip.

I'm not sure if the same principle applies to hard disks (since they operate by storing a magnetic field rather than a charge), but nonetheless it's an interesting thought

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Comments:

From:

rustica
Tuesday 30th June 2009 at 9:36 pm (UTC)

There was a question about this over on

physics some time ago, if I recall correctly. But I can't remember what they concluded....

(Reply) (Thread)

From:

olego
Tuesday 30th June 2009 at 9:48 pm (UTC)

Well, Boyd Bushman says that magnetic fields cancel out gravity... So it could be true!

I didn't know that flash memory traps electrons! That's cool. :)

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From:

boggyb
Tuesday 30th June 2009 at 10:00 pm (UTC)

At least one variant stores a charge on a floating gate, and the only way I can think of is to trap some electrons on it. If you assume that when idle the rest of the chip is kept at a constant potential, then the number of electrons in the chip must have increased.

This does assume that I've got my head round it right :)

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