interestingengineering.com
Physicist Says Information is Actually a State of Matter
But how are we powering our digital world?
Science & Tech
A UK physicist has released a new paper where he argues that at the current rate of digital production, by 2245, half of Earth’s mass will be converted to digital information mass, making digital information the fifth state of matter. The paper, appropriately titled "The information catastrophe" is an eye-opening look at how we process information.
“How can information, a mathematical concept, be physical? To my surprise, this principle, which makes sense theoretically, has now been demonstrated experimentally,” Melvin Vopson, a physicist at the University of Portsmouth, told ZME Science.
Vopson went on to explain why he thinks digital information will be the fifth state of matter.
“Although information manifests itself in many formats including analog information, biological DNA encoded information, and digital information, the most fundamental form is the binary digital bit because it can successfully represent or duplicate all existing forms of information. This is also valid for quantum processing — q-bits, as the final output of a quantum computer is still in the binary digital format,” Vopson said.