I'm always looking for simpler experiments to test MiHsC. It seems every few months I find a simpler one, so maybe I should just wait till I find one simple enough to do with Lego :) Anyway, one I have recently noticed was by Kish (2007). He took flash drives, weighed them to milligram accuracy and noticed that whenever they were written to, or erased, they lost a bit of weight (about 0.001%) for a short time.
First the caution: what could be happening is that the flash drive is getting hot and moving the air nearby by convection, or water is evaporating from it. Kish (2007) thought not, because the effect did not depend on humidity, or decay with time in the right way. A better experiment would use a vacuum to eliminate these possibilities.
Second the wonder: this could be due to MiHsC. Whenever flash drives are used, the electrons in them are hugely accelerated (flash drives write to memory in one go rather than bit by bit) and you may remember that in MiHsC, whenever there is an acceleration, the inertial mass of everything close by increases slightly. This means that the flash drives, when used, should gain inertial mass by MiHsC and become slightly less sensitive to gravity, ie: they will appear to lose weight, as observed.
This is a simple experiment to do, requiring only flash drives and precision balances, and ideally a vacuum. Without the vacuum it could be done at home. Also unlike the superconductor experiments I've been discussing, the motion of electrons in flash drives should be calculable, and so it should be possible to make a prediction of the weight loss with MiHsC (see McCulloch, 2011) and then test it.
I intend to try this experiment at home (vacuumless) during 2014, but I thought I would mention it here so if anyone out there has the equipment, skill and enthusiasm, you could try it too (the more the merrier). I'd love to see your results: especially estimates of the electron acceleration and a measurement of the drive's weight loss, if any.
References
Kish, L.B., 2007. Gravitational mass of information. Fluct. Noise Letters, Vol. 7, No. 4, C51-C68 (see section 3, experiments). Preprint
McCulloch, M.E., 2011. Physics Procedia, Vol. 20, 134-139. Preprint , Paper
7 comments:
Another thing to watch out for is E/M effects from the flash drive onto the scale during RW.
Also, I would be interested on the physical setup (USB extension etc) as I agree, it may be something else affecting the weight reading.
Yes, the experiment needs to be redone in a vacuum & with a Faraday cage.
Make it as closed-system as possible? Control the drive with a PLC/PGA/FPGA/SoC (depending on how fancy you want to get) with internal power, with the entire system completely enclosed and shielded, running with the bare minimum information exchange outside of your test chamber (like maybe one LED). The system operation should also contribute to observed effect, but I'm thinking there's sufficient information available to closely estimate what that might be, and it may be moot, as I would think the R/RW magnitude would overwhelm it. My 2 pisa from the peanut gallery, and I really wish you'd have shut the door on that rabbit-hole, the drop near to killed me...
Thank you for your suggestion of a System on a Chip (SoC): the more isolated the better. I suspect, on balance :) that most of Kish's weight anomaly was due to an interaction with the air, but I think that with more isolation this experiment would be a relatively easy way to expose MiHsC effects.
I apologise for writing as I am a layman but I find your blog very interesting and am trying to understand without having the mathematics to do so. So, Question: Since the inertial mass of nearby objects increases when subjected to the presence of an acceleration object could it be accurately visualised that the object is "gripping nearby objects in their locations" (by increasing their inertial mass) in order to permit acceleration relative to them? Or is this "not even wrong"?
Truckle: No apology needed. Good question. It could be said that they are gripping nearby objects, but in the reference frame of the gripping object. So, it would look like they are pulling other objects along.
Fascinating! Actually a better way to test might be using a centrifuge with magnetic bearings, slowly accelerate drive to some ridiculous G equivalent then run the tests with the motor drive disconnected. Any decay change should be wasily observable.
Not sure if simply powering the drive but not writing would be enough as many of these implement wear leveling: perhaps simply disabling the on-chip HV supply by dropping Vcc below minimum would be adequate.
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