From: cvieri@ai.mit.edu (Carlin Vieri)
Date: Fri, 5 May 95 16:34:10 EDT
To: all-ai
Subject: GSB Today 5:30


In the great and noble tradition of research at Louisiana State
University, we have, courtesy of grg, had the tremendous pleasure of
perusing a paper entitled "Information, Physics, and Computation."  A
title clearly worthy of any field dominated by over the hill hacks and
young upstarts trying to make a name for themselves by putting out
papers with grand and glorious, albeit content free, titles.

But, lest you assume the author is merely a small cog in a large
behaviour, he finds it necessary to quote W.B. Yeats as follows:

	A line will take us hours maybe;
	Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
	Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

What is the author driving at?  Did his paper take him, maybe, hours
per line to write?  Did he spend not a moment thinking about what he
was writing?  Was he instead poorly darning his socks when he should
have been thinking about the drivel he put forth as "research"?

I think perhaps the answer is a combination of all of the above.
Clearly the author has heard of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle,
because he knows that E = h-bar/deltaT, and since it has been well
established that the minimum entropy of a bit of information is kTln2,
clearly a bit has t=4.08e-12sec, at room temperature.

But you can't stop there.  The minimum "time of a bit" is just the
beginning.  The author is, clearly, thoroughly versed in the
intricacies of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, because he
knows also that E = m c^2, and since we know E = kTln2, as above, the
*mass* of a bit of information must be 0.287e-36 grams, or roughly
3e-7 times the mass of an electron.  Does this imply that an electron
contains three megabits of information?  That would leave quite a few
quantum numbers for our pals across the tracks to discover. 

Or perhaps, are we on the brink of a new computer revolution?  Will
future DRAM technologies make use of the extra informational mass in
electrons?  Will gigabyte hard drives be replaced by a small Faraday
ice bucket?

While we don't know much about the mass of information, we do know ice
buckets.  Come dig through ours to find your favorite flavor of
quantum mechanical system, be it up (root beer), down (ginger beer),
strange (Black and Tan), charm (Stout), bottom (Ale), or top (Corona
Extra, in honour of Cinco de Mayo), at this week's 

               G I R L   S C O U T   B E N E F I T

at 5:30pm today in the 7th floor playroom.