The information traveling through the entire Internet at any one time weighs 50g- around the weight of a single (large) strawberry, according to new research.
The research follows a recent study, that revealed that eBook readers ‘gain weight’ when you add new books to your library – due to the energy ‘gained’ by electrons when they store information, and the weight of that energy.
Filling a Kindle with books causes it to gain an infinitesimally small amount of mass – so small that it gains 100,000,000 times more when a user recharges the battery.
The calculations use Einstein’s famous E=MC squared formula, which relates energy to mass.
Electrons which ‘store’ data in a device have higher energy than electrons which don’t – therefore a device weighs more.
The difference in weight in gadgets full of information and ’empty’ gadgets is far less than the difference produced by charging the battery, or wiping dust off the screen.
Now YouTube science channel Vsauce has used the same mathematics to calculate the mass of the entire internet, which comes in at 50g.
The video goes on to demonstrate that the actual information in it weighs less than a speck of dust.
Vsauce says that the 50g figure is the weight of all the electrons in the electricity required to make the internet work – assuming 75-100 million servers supporting the internet, and not including the home PCs running it.
The whole lot equates to around 40billion watts – which weighs in around the same as a plump strawberry.
If you include all the home PCs using the net, the figure is roughly three strawberries.
The weight if you’re just counting the data stored in the internet is much less.
It’s difficult to quantify how much data there is in the internet – Vsauce used a (dated) estimate by Google’s Eric Schmidt.
Schmidt guessed that there were 5,000,000 terabytes of information in the internet – of which Google indexed 0.04%.
The entire weight of that information would work out, Vsauce estimates, to 0.02 millionths of an ounce.
View the video below:
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