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Codebreaker

The Internet weighs as much as a strawberry

Marc Sanchez Nov 1, 2011

On today’s show, we told you about how a fully loaded Kindle weighs a bit more than one with no books on it. How much more? A billionth OF a billionth of a gram. Not much. That’s because to store data an electron needs to be captured and assigned to keep a bit of information at a 1 or a 0. Energy is needed to keep that electron assigned and Einstein teaches us that energy and mass are equivalent, therefore all this energy has weight. So if you extrapolate out from one Kindle to the entire internet and all the information on it, you get the weight equivalent of one strawberry.

BUT DON’T ACCIDENTALLY EAT THE INTERNET. We need it.

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