Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?

On Friday, October 26, 2018 at 1:59:13 AM UTC-6, Paul Schlyter wrote:

Since information is a non-material property we can feel confident
that information is massless. Consider an unordered heap of small
balls. Now rearrange them in some ordered way so that they e.g. form
some letters with a message you wish to display. Would that change
the total mass of these small balls?

And let's ask this question again: would erasing all software on a
computer change the mass of the computer?

Since energy has mass, and the entropy of a system is connected to how much
energy it has, and entropy is connected to information, it might be argued that
information in some sense does have a tiny amount of mass.

However, it would be so tiny as to be impossible to measure.

Plus, of course, "information" is sometimes hard to define. A hard disk that can
store N bits of information always *has* N bits of information on it, no matter
what state those bits are in. Maybe if all the bits are zero, that information
is less interesting, but whether that is "less information" would depend on
history...

if all the bits are zero because the disk was erased, then in one sense, it has
no information;

if all the bits were zero because they contained the answers to N independent
yes or no questions, the answers to all of which just happened to be no, then it
would have N bits of information.

John Savard