The mass-energy-information equivalence principle

A new principle of mass-energy-information equivalence has been formulated, proposing that a bit of digital information is not just physical, but it has a finite and quantifiable mass while it stores information.  

In this paper Dr Vopson, expands the Landauer’s principle to the mass - energy - information equivalence principle by providing viable arguments that the physical nature of digital information requires a bit of information to have a very small, non-zero mass. This is a very abstract concept with some speculative aspects, but it has the virtue of being verifiable in a laboratory environment and a possible experiment to validate the proposed idea is described in this letter. A successful test would offer a direct experimental confirmation of the mass - energy - information equivalence principle with far reaching implications in physics, cosmology, big data, computation and technologies. Within the digital Universe concept, all the baryonic matter has an associated information content. The estimated mass of a bit of information at T = 2.73K is m_bit = 2.91 × 10^-40 Kg. Assuming that all the missing dark matter is in fact information mass, the initial estimates indicate that ∼10⁹³ bits would be sufficient to explain all the missing dark matter in the visible Universe. Dr Vopson argue that information is a distinct form of matter, or the 5^th state, along the other four observable solid, liquid, gas, and plasma states of matter.
The paper is free to access from AIP Advances:  https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794