Weighing the Internet: A thought experiment that keeps getting lighter

Editor's take: The internet is vast, sprawling across server farms, fiber-optic cables, and satellites. But beyond its physical infrastructure, does the internet – the data, the information, the very essence of cyberspace – have any measurable weight? The question might sound absurd, yet it's one that physicists and thinkers have pondered for years. After all, Einstein's famous equation, E = mc², tells us that energy has mass. And since storing and transmitting data consumes energy, it follows that the internet must, in theory, possess some infinitesimal amount of weight. The first serious attempt to quantify the internet's weight came in 2006, when Harvard physicist Russell Seitz made headlines with his calculation. By estimating the mass of the energy powering servers at the time, Seitz concluded that the internet weighed about 50 grams, or roughly the same as a couple of strawberries. The comparison stuck, becoming a quirky piece of trivia from an era when the web was still in its ... Read full article.