How a full Kindle weighs more
May
15 2012 at 11:25am
By Daily Mail
By Daily Mail
Amazon
first started producing the Kindle in 2009.
London
- When the Kindle e-reader was launched, we all thought it meant the end to
lugging heavy tomes around.
But
perhaps you shouldn’t put away your book bag quite yet.
For
a full 4GB Kindle - stocked with 3,500 books - is ever so slightly heavier than
an empty one. The reason is rather complicated, and owes a debt to Einstein.
Storing
new data on a Kindle involves holding electrons - tiny particles that help make
up an atom - in a fixed place in the device’s memory. Although the electrons
are already present in an empty Kindle, keeping them still uses more energy
than allowing them to flow around.
As
Einstein pointed out in his equation E=MC2, energy and mass are directly linked
- so filling up a 4GB Kindle makes it weigh 0.000000000000000001g more than an
empty one.
It’s
still better than the real thing though - 3,500 ordinary books would weigh
around two tons. - Daily Mail
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