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How much information per unit volume can the various states of matter hold?

Asked by Qingu (21185points) August 24th, 2010

I reckon that a cubic meter of ice can hold more information than a cubic meter of water. The ice can be arranged in crystals that encode information; water can’t.

Likewise, water can probably hold more information than a similar volume of gas, because it takes up more space.

What about a plasma? Or a Bose-Einstein condensate, or other states of matter? And does this have anything to do with the laws of thermodynamics?

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