> Tyre data is literally worth its weight in gold unfortunately
The minimum amount of energy to flip a bit at the temperature of the cosmic background radiation, converted to equivalent mass via E=MC^2, is minuscule. (The mass of a black hole with one bit of entropy at its surface is also minuscule.) So any data worth storing is literally worth several orders of magnitude more than its weight in gold (assuming the gold and the data are weighed under the same gravitational acceleration).
Edit: apparently people are taking my response as being more snarky than I intended. I just find it interesting that bits actually have mass. Information is incredibly expensive on a per-mass basis.
Thanks for the clarification. I think we all understood what you meant. A more literal interpretation just reminded me of a tidbit of physics I find very interesting.
Previous commenter did write "literally". A word which, IMO, is ridiculously overused and abused by people with a bit of a chip on their shoulder. I'd say they asked for it! :)
Photons have no resting mass, but my understanding that they still distort spacetime. It's not only mass that generates gravity. We're talking about weight, and it's mass-eneregy that warps spacetime/generates gravity.[0]
My understanding is that none of the virtual interactions in the Feynman path integral for that photon traveling through spacetime (such as spontaneously becoming a particle-antiparticle pair) affect the far-field gravitational field generated by the photon.
Also, 99% of the mass of your body is not electrons and quarks, but the binding energy between quarks. The mass of a proton is ~938 MeV/C^2, but the masses of its quarks sum to about 9 MeV/C^2. The rest of the proton's mass is the binding energy of the quarks. You get a similar ratio for the neutron. The electron's resting mass is roughly 0.5 MeV/C^2.
I think the Higgs mechanism is responsible for the rest mass of quarks, leptons, and neutrinos, but the majority of mass in atoms is due to nuclear binding energy, not the Higgs mechanism.
Though, my formal physics education didn't go beyond Freshman year E&M, so I could be way off.
The minimum amount of energy to flip a bit at the temperature of the cosmic background radiation, converted to equivalent mass via E=MC^2, is minuscule. (The mass of a black hole with one bit of entropy at its surface is also minuscule.) So any data worth storing is literally worth several orders of magnitude more than its weight in gold (assuming the gold and the data are weighed under the same gravitational acceleration).
http://scottkurowski.com/massbit/index.htm
Edit: apparently people are taking my response as being more snarky than I intended. I just find it interesting that bits actually have mass. Information is incredibly expensive on a per-mass basis.