Joseph Zitt

The customer was fidgeting with a DVD when I came over to him. “Can I help you find anything?”

“Actually, I have a question for you,” he said. He spoke quickly, not quite agitated but clearly wired, and with an accent that sounded vaguely West African or Caribbean, though I couldn’t pin it down further than that. “What is the difference in relative mass between this DVD and an empty DVD?”

I figured that this was somehow going to lead to a question about shipping charges. “Well, DVD’s don’t weigh very much, so an empty case won’t weigh much less than a case that has a DVD in it.”

“No, no, not an empty DVD case. An empty DVD, without information on it.”

“Do you mean a blank DVD versus a recorded one?”

“Yes, yes, precisely, an empty DVD versus, as you say, recorded.”

I thought for a moment. “There should be no difference at all.” (Actually, I wasn’t quite sure if the change in the die caused by the laser actually made any difference in the mass, but I don’t think so.)

“Ahah!” he said gleefully. “So Einstein was indeed wrong!”

Thinking rapidly and deeply about this revelation, I responded with an erudite “Huh?”

He walked over to our display of blank DVDs, picked one up, and waved it in the air. “This DVD is empty. It has no information. Correct?”

“That’s close enough to true,” I said.

He waved the recorded DVD in his other hand. “And this DVD is full of information. Correct?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Yet they weigh exactly the same amount!” Apparently he had taken into account the weight of the substantial booklet in the recorded DVD’s case.

“Ok… But Einstein?”

“Einstein!” he crowed. “Einstein declared that e equals m c squared, that energy and mass are the same thing. Yet this contains information, which is clearly a thing, yet you say that it makes no difference to the mass.”

“Well. It does have more information. But information doesn’t necessarily weigh anything.”

“Yes! And therefore Einstein was wrong!”

I was growing more puzzled. “Look, if there’s a piece of paper with a bunch of random letters on it, and another piece of paper with the letters arranged into a poem, what is the difference in what they weigh?”

“You say that there is no difference. But Einstein said that there must be.”

“What does Einstein have to do with it?”

“The information is either a thing, in which case it has mass, or has moved the items around, in which case it is an energy, which should be converted to mass, like ice turning to water. And a lecture that I just came from said that all twentieth century science, especially Einstein, was wrong, because they ignored the presence of information.”

OK, so this guy had just fallen off the deep end of science without having taken Physics 101. “But Information Science is a huge field.”

“Physics ignores it,” he said. “It is wrong.”

“So you’re saying that if something contains information, it must be heavier than something that is not.”

“Correct!”

I picked up five CDs from a display and put them on a table near us, shifting them around. “OK, here are five CDs. They are in alphabetical order. Would you say that that is more information than they contain on their own?”

“Obviously,” he said.

Using my best Three Card Monte skills, I scrambled the order of the discs. “Now do you see that they are not in order?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Do you say that they now weigh more or less than they did before?”

“If there was an order to them, they must have weighed more, and you dissipated the mass in the energy of scrambling them.”

“Hmm, how can I explain this?… OK, information exists, but it doesn’t make things heavier or, um, warmer. It’s irrelevant to mass or energy.”

“If it is a quality that exists it must be expressible as mass or energy, or Einstein was wrong.”

At this point I really wished I could reach over and pull Douglas Hofstadter out from behind a pillar. “Look,” I said, “It boils down to a simple analogy. Tell me: Is red louder than a square?”

He actually stopped fidgeting for a moment. “That question cannot have a meaningful answer.”

“Precisely!” I said. “And there can be no meaningful answer as to the weight of information, since information is not a mass-or-energy kind of thing.” By this point I was plowing ahead on my own momentum, vaguely aware that I was utterly winging it and wasn’t entirely sure that I wasn’t, in some high-level scientific way, dead wrong. But I tried not to let it show.

“So Einstein was wrong!” he said again.

“What do you believe that Einstein said about this?”

“Einstein said that e equals m c squared, that energy is the same thing as matter and that that’s the only thing in the universe.”

I started to get what he meant. “OK, he did say that they can be essentially the same thing. But I don’t think he said that they were the only things in the universe.”

“What else might he have believed that there would be?”

It was time for a mad theoretical leap. “As you might recall, Einstein said that God does not play dice with the universe.”

“I recall that he did, yes.”

“So he must have allowed for the possible existence, in some sense, of God, correct?”

“I suppose that he did.”

“So is God matter or is God energy?”

He stared blankly for a moment, his hands dropping to his sides. “God must be neither. So… Einstein said that there was matter, energy, and… God? And God is above them?”

“Well, I think he said that there might be a God. And I don’t know if God would be above them, or alongside.” I gestured, moving my hands in skew lines.

“Alongside… not… maybe…”

“And thus information is alongside energy or matter, and doesn’t affect weight.”

He stood silent, his face moving between epiphany and breakdown.

Suddenly, another customer ran up and stood between us. “Joe! I loved the discs you sold me last night! Now you have to find me the Brian Eno, Gerald Markoe, and Tony Scott discs again!”

“OK,” I said. I looked up at the Einstein guy and said “Excuse me,” but he didn’t seem to notice. And by the time that I found the discs for the other customer, he had disappeared.

Later, a coworker who had been standing nearby said that we had been getting rather loud in the conversation. “I thought you were arguing about a bogus coupon or something until I listened to you. Then I thought of getting involved, but couldn’t find a way to wedge in.”

“I wish you had,” I said. “Your science is probably less rusty than mine.” As with most of my coworkers, he had probably taken a science class a quarter-century more recently than I had.

My supervisor then came over. “You do know that that’s the guy who was in here a few months ago complaining that we had conspired with the FBI to steal his jacket, right?”

“It’s that guy? That sort of makes his not making sense make sense.”

“It figures that he’d come to you.”

I sighed. “They all come to me. I’m the freak magnet.”

I had a few more weird people during the day, and there will be more in the next few. Whether or not these have an effect, it is just about the full moon, and it’s the first of the month, when many of our regulars get their government checks. So we’ll be seeing more, with more odd encounters. Perhaps I’d better brush up on relativity, just in case.