Einstein’s theory of general relativity was revolutionary on many levels. One of its many groundbreaking consequences is that mass and energy are basically interchangeable at rest. The immediate implication is that you can make mass — tangible matter — out of energy, thereby explaining how the universe as we know it came to be during the Big Bang when a heck lot of energy turned into the first particles. But there may be much more to it.

In 2019, physicist Melvin Vopson of the University of Portsmouth proposed that information is equivalent to mass and energy, existing as a separate state of matter, a conjecture known as the mass-energy-information equivalence principle. This would mean that every bit of information has a finite and quantifiable mass. For instance, a hard drive full of information is heavier than the same drive empty.

That’s a bold claim, to say the least. Now, in a new study, Vopson is ready to put his money where his mouth is, proposing an experiment that can verify this conjecture.

“The main idea of the study is that information erasure can be achieved when matter particles annihilate their corresponding antimatter particles. This process essentially erases a matter particle from existence. The annihilation process converts all the [remaining] mass of the annihilating particles into energy, typically gamma photons. However, if the particles do contain information, then this also needs to be conserved upon annihilation, producing some lower-energy photons. In the present study, I predicted the exact energy of the infrared red photons resulting from this information erasure, and I gave a detailed protocol for the experimental testing involving the electron-positron annihilation process,” Vopson told ZME Science.

Information: just another form of matter and energy?

The mass-energy-information equivalence (M/E/I) principle combines Rolf Launder’s application of the laws of thermodynamics with information theory — which says information is another form of energy — and Claude Shannon’s information theory that led to the invention of the first digital bit. This M/E/I principle, along with its main prediction that information has mass, is what Vopson calls the 1st information conjecture.

The 2nd conjecture is that all elementary particles store information content about themselves, similarly to how living things are encoded by DNA. In another recent study, Vopson used this 2nd conjecture to calculate the information storage capacity of all visible matter in the Universe. The physicist also calculated that — at a current 50% annual growth rate in the number of digital bits humans are producing — half of Earth’s mass would be converted to digital information mass within 150 years.

However, testing these conjectures is not trivial. For instance, a 1 terabyte hard drive filled with digital information would gain a mass of only 2.5 × 10^-25 Kg compared to the same erased drive. Measuring such a tiny change in mass is impossible even with the most sensitive scale in the world.

Instead, Vopson has proposed an experiment that tests both conjectures using a particle-antiparticle collision. Since every particle is supposed to contain information, which supposedly has its own mass, then that information has to go somewhere when the particle is annihilated. In this case, the information should be converted into low-energy infrared photons.

The experiment

According to Vopson’s predictions, an electron-positron collision should produce two high-energy gamma rays, as well as two infrared photons with wavelengths around 50 micrometers. The physicist adds that altering the samples’ temperature wouldn’t influence the energy of the gamma rays, but would shift the wavelength of the infrared photons. This is important because it provides a control mechanism for the experiment that can rule out other physical processes.

Validating the mass-energy-information equivalence principle could have far-reaching implications for physics as we know it. In a previous interview with ZME Science, Vopson said that if his conjectures are correct, the universe would contain a stupendous amount of digital information. He speculated that — considering all these things — the elusive dark matter could be just information. Only 5% of the universe is made of baryonic matter (i.e. things we can see or measure), while the rest of the 95% mass-energy content is made of dark matter and dark energy — fancy terms physicists use to describe things that they have no idea what they look like.

Then there’s the black hole information loss paradox. According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the gravity of a black hole is so overwhelming, that nothing can escape its clutches within its event horizon — not even light. But in the 1970s, Stephen Hawking and collaborators sought to finesse our understanding of black holes by using quantum theory; and one of the central tenets of quantum mechanics is that information can never be lost. One of Hawking’s major predictions is that black holes emit radiation, now called Hawking radiation. But with this prediction, the late British physicist had pitted the ultimate laws of physics — general relativity and quantum mechanics — against one another, hence the information loss paradox. The mass-energy-information equivalence principle may lend a helping hand in reconciling this paradox.

“It appears to be exactly the same thing that I am proposing in this latest article, but at very different scales. Looking closely into this problem will be the scope of a different study and for now, it is just an interesting idea that must be followed,” Vopson tells me.

Finally, the mass-energy-information equivalence could help settle a whimsical debate that has been gaining steam lately: the notion that we may all be living inside a computer simulation. The debate can be traced to a seminal paper published in 2003 by Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford, which argued that a technologically adept civilization with immense computing power could simulate new realities with conscious beings in them. Bostrom argued that the probability that we are living in a simulation is close to one.

While it’s easy to dismiss the computer simulation theory, once you think about it, you can’t disprove it either. But Vopson thinks the two conjectures could offer a way out of this dilemma.

“It is like saying, how a character in the most advanced computer game ever created, becoming self-aware, could prove that it is inside a computer game? What experiments could this entity design from within the game to prove its reality is indeed computational?  Similarly, if our world is indeed computational / simulation, then how could someone prove this? What experiments should one perform to demonstrate this?”

“From the information storage angle – a simulation requires information to run: the code itself, all the variables, etc… are bits of information stored somewhere.”

“My latest article offers a way of testing our reality from within the simulation, so a positive result would strongly suggest that the simulation hypothesis is probably real,” the physicist said.