Weighty Words
by Paul McGoldrick
There can be little argument in our modern world that bad science is prevalent. Climate scientists, for example, have to endure the rantings of pseudo-scientific pundits who will postulate that because it snowed somewhere, then global warming is a lie. Whatever their reasons for the strange positions they take, these people would like nothing better than for the scientists to come on their shows and engage with them. That, however, is one way of giving some credence to the idiocy; the best minds out there will have no part of it and decline such invitations.
The same thing may be true for the news item (would someone define ‘news’ for me?) in the New York Times wherein a computer scientist (another term that surely is a non sequitur) has decided that a device such as a Kindle gets heavier when you load more data into it. “Although the total number of electrons in the memory does not change as the stored data changes, the trapped ones have a higher energy level than the untrapped ones…”
Dr. John Kubiatowicz is a respected professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, and with three degrees from MIT you would think that he would take more care with mental meanderings like this, particularly as his academic story includes both electrical engineering and physics. He proposes that the higher energy of a ‘trapped’ electron (one that indicates a ‘1’ status bit, he says) amounts to something of the order of 10e-15 joules per bit. He then, for some unknown reason, gets poor old Einstein into the mix with relativity’s E = mc2, postulating that this energy increase implies mass increase, and therefore weight. For a 4 Gbyte Flash memory Kindle, this calculates out, he says, to 1.7 x 10e-5 joules. (My simplified arithmetic says this number is wrong: 4 Gbyte = 3.44 x 10e10 bits; therefore E = 3.44 x 10e-5 joules – double the good doctor’s number; and with the speed of light, c, as 3 x 10e6 m/s, then m = (3.44 x 10e-5) ÷ (3 x 10e6)2 = 3.8 x 10e-18 g – nearly four times the good doctor’s calculation.)
But that all assumes this assumption is true and valid. I don’t believe it is. This trapped/non-trapped electron stuff in a closed system makes my hairs bristle; makes it sound like electrons are free to move around unless we tell them otherwise. Even if energy levels were changed who is to say which way they change: is it higher for a status change from ‘0’ to’1’, or is it the other way around? In that argument you might be able to say that the Kindle actually loses weight (sorry, mass) rather than gaining it. Sure, work has been done in the status change – resulting in current draw from a battery source and in heat – but energy level changes?
Memory status changes are, to me, merely a movement of a charge location; no new charge is created and none is lost. I think the professor must be confusing what ‘floating gate’ actually means…
Unfortunately, the idea of a Kindle increasing in weight has led to other fatuous calculations, like the guy who reckons that the Internet weighs as little as a strawberry; well, actually, 50 g, which would be a HUGE strawberry.
Anyway, it is absolutely obvious that the weight of a Kindle depends on the letters, rather than the electrons, that are trapped inside: letters like A and O take up much less space than an I, for example, because they are balloon like and float. Es and Zs are particularly heavy – how EZ is that for mental logic?
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