A Balancing Act: Strawberry and Internet

Internet weighs merely 50g, which is just about the same weight of a strawberry, state Vsause, a science show on YouTube.

The study, which seems to be inspired by a mathematician who recently calculated that eBook readers "gain weight" when adding new books to the library, said that the weight equals that of a strawberry only if counting the data not the electricity required to make it work, the Daily Mail reported.

The calculations use Einstein's famous "E=MC" squared formula, which relates energy to mass.

Vsauce says that the 50g figure is the weight of all the electrons in the electricity required to make the internet work, assuming 75-100 million servers supporting the internet, and not including the home PCs running it.

The whole lot equates to around 40 billion watts, which weigh in around the same as a plump strawberry, and if all the home PCs using the net are included, the figure is roughly three strawberries.

Since it's difficult to quantify how much data there is in the Internet, Vsauce used a dated estimate by Google's Eric Schmidt.

Schmidt guessed that there were 5,000,000 terabytes of information in the internet out of which Google indexed 0.04 per cent and that the entire weight of that information would work out, Vsauce estimates, to 0.02 millionths of an ounce.

Source: ANI