Mom asks Daniel a riddle. If you could put all the information on the internet on a scale -- every photo, video, message, and website -- how much would it weigh?

He says tons.

Some physicists have estimated it could weigh roughly as much as a strawberry. And the reason why is one of the most mind-bending things about how computers actually work.

Everything stored on a computer is ultimately represented as ones and zeros. Those ones and zeros have to be physically encoded somewhere inside the machine. In many kinds of memory, electrons help create the states that represent data. In others, it is magnetic orientation, or optical patterns, or voltage levels. What all of these have in common is that the physical states involved weigh almost nothing.

An electron weighs about nine times ten to the power of minus thirty-one kilog ...