Monkey Business - Part III

You think we can get a lot of data stored in a memory chip, or a lot of data stored on a disk drive? Well, that's nothing compared to the potential storage of information available in a piece of matter.

A little look at the nature of digital information is in order first. Most all digital data is stored in bits. A bit is a two-valued piece of information. It can either be 0 or 1, on or off, yes or no, any two paired values. Virtually all digital information is stored this way. Two bits can store 4 possible values: 00, 01, 10, 11. Three bits can store 8 values: 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111. And so on. The characters that I am typing in my computer keyboard are generally represented by 8-bit chunks. This gives a possibility of 256 characters, upper and lower case letters, numbers, punctuation, and many special symbols. In computers these bits are generally stored by having section of a memory chip be either a high voltage or a low voltage, on or off. As you probably know, the amount of physical space it takes to store these massive arrays of bits has progressively grown smaller and smaller through the years since computing has become prominent. So what is the limit of how much can be stored in these small spaces?

It is possible to exploit methods of storage of data at a atomic and sub-atomic level. For example, an electron has a property called 'spin'. The spin can be 'up' or 'down' (picture your hand with the thumb up; the spin is the direction of the fingers curl, and it is up or down depending on whether thumb is pointing up or down). It turns out that the spin on an electron can be flipped easily by zapping it with a laser. This state of 'up' or 'down' can be detected, so a bit of data can be stored in this way. Basically, every changeable attribute of elementary particles such as electrons, photons, and other elements of atoms can theoretically be used to store information. Researchers have been able to store 1024 bits of information in a single molecule containing only 19 hydrogen atoms. So what is the ultimate amount of information that can be stored in a piece of matter?

Well, first, without going into the details of how it is figured out, estimates have been made that the human brain can store about a billion billion bits of information (that's 10 to the 18th power). So lets take a rock that weighs 1 kilogram (2.2 lbs). If all the molecules were used for storage how much information could you store? It is calculated to be 10 to the 27th power bits. That is on the same order of magnitude as all the human brains on the planet. And this is not even using all the available technology to squeeze more out of it, like supercooling. Furthermore, if the rock were used for computing, it could, in the ultimate theoretical state, do a million trillion trillion trillion computations per second (10 to the 42nd power) which is about 10 trillion times more powerful than and the human brain computing power on the planet.

And this is just a 2.2lb rock. Think if the whole planet was used for computing. What if the whole universe was a computer? Would this qualify as being God (or just a God computer)? I'll leave that philosophical question for you to ponder. But I will tell you that Mr. Lloyd, a very intelligent MIT professor, has developed theories to show that, and believes that, the whole universe is computing.