by Aayush Arya, the Next Web
According to computer scientist John Kubiatowicz, from UC Berkeley. The books you put on your Kindle increase its weight, and not in the sense of gaining you respect among your friends and colleagues for having a scholarly taste in books. No sir, it’s actual weight in the physical world. And it’s not just the Kindle or just e-readers either, it’s every device that you load data on. You see, the downloading of ebooks to your e-reader changes the level of energy stored in the electrons on it. Their physical number stays the same but, as Albert Einstein so cleverly put it, E=mc2. If those electrons are storing more energy, they gain more mass—ergo, your e-reader becomes heavier! You may have noticed that you have read over 150 words already and have yet to find out how much the weight actually increases by. That is by design. Because the increase in weight is by 10-18 of a gram, or 0.000000000000000001g. Kubiatowicz tells us that it’s called an attogram.
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