[myaccount80]

You can encode every book and information in a small rod. Just take a 1 meter long rod and encode your book into binary, eg 01011110111. Now, take your binary string, and transform it into a decimal number in base 2 by prepending 0. , E.g. x=0.01011110111. As this number is finite and smaller than 1, you can just take your rod and cut it at length x. Now when you want to retrieve your information you just need to measure x from your rod with a ruler, take the decimal part and convert it into binary, and voila. You can encode almost infinite amount of data into a simple rod. Assuming you can measure and cut very precisely

[capitainenemo]

Small problem of how to make cuts at a subatomic level ;)

(edit for pedantism and type of atom) at an optimistic 100 billion carbon atoms in length for a metre stick, the maximum distinct cuts you can make are 100 billion, or 100 gigabytes of info. We do much better these days with thumb drives.

[jclarkcom]

Not to mention thermal expansion which doesn’t happen evenly and trying to cut or measure would have an effect

[chrisshroba]

That 's only if you can make multiple cuts (or slits), and it's actually 8x less because we're talking about bits, not bytes.

With only one cut as the parent comment describes, you can only store the log base 2 of 100 billion, which is 36, so about 4 bytes of info, or one long integer.

[hsfzxjy]

Caveat: data with trailing zeros will share the same location, e.g., 0.1 & 0.010 . A quick fix would be appending a 1 to all data.