Melvin Vopson, a German physicist at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, suggests that digital data is changing the mass of the Earth. According to Vopson’s calculations, today’s “pile of visual images”, that is, about half a billion tweets, countless texts and billions of WhatsApp messages, together with every piece of information created, weigh down the planet. Because their contribution to the Earth’s mass is very small, it has not yet been measured. However, the development of technology and the increase in the human population may reverse this in the future. For example, it is estimated that in 350 years the weight of digital information may outweigh all the atoms on Earth.
The scientist goes even further and argues that dark matter, what it is, cannot be solved in any way, can also consist only of information. ”This will change our understanding of the universe, but it will not contradict any of the existing laws of physics,” the physicist says, adding: Quantum mechanics does not contradict electrodynamics, thermodynamics or classical mechanics. All it does is complete physics in a new and incredibly exciting way.
Two assumptions stand out in Vopson’s new article. The first of these is the main prediction that information also has mass. According to the second assumption, all elementary particles store information content about themselves, similar to the way living things are encoded by DNA. In other words, each electron carries information. Vopson’s experimental proposal is based precisely on this second assumption and predicts the collision of matter with antimatter. According to the laws of physics, a collision between matter and antimatter can lead to the Decimation of both. Vopson also states that when the particles are destroyed, information will remain. The physicist states that this information will turn into low-energy infrared photons, and he can prove this with the experiment in question. “The information in an electron is 22 million times smaller than its mass, ” Vopson said. We can measure information only by deleting the electron,” he says and adds: When you collide a matter particle with an antimatter particle, they destroy each other. We know this. When the particle disappears, this information has to go somewhere.