Looking at the paper linked to in the article[1], I'm having a hard time not dismissing this immediately. There are several implications to this theory:
- Information has mass.
- Information cannot exist at absolute zero.
Does this mean that bringing a hard drive to absolute zero changes its mass and erases its contents? Does the information somehow come back after the drive is warmed up? Also there are many ways to represent information: magnetic charges on a spinning platter, electrical charges in SSDs, physical impressions on metal, graphite on paper, etc. Do all of these get destroyed at absolute zero? I don't know how that's reconcilable with the rest of physics.
- Information has mass.
- Information cannot exist at absolute zero.
Does this mean that bringing a hard drive to absolute zero changes its mass and erases its contents? Does the information somehow come back after the drive is warmed up? Also there are many ways to represent information: magnetic charges on a spinning platter, electrical charges in SSDs, physical impressions on metal, graphite on paper, etc. Do all of these get destroyed at absolute zero? I don't know how that's reconcilable with the rest of physics.
1. https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794