Principle of truth...
Writing a blog is kind of trancendental experience - you know that no one reads it , and in the same time - everyone....
But ad rem:
There are numerous professions , where lies are tolerated, if not standard tools of trade: doctor, lawyer, priest, spy, politician... normally earn their bread by creative use of lies, or at least by keeping mum. And - have very good chance to get away with it...
But in some, less fortunate jobs , lying is - sooner or later- surely and painfully punished, and nearly always verified.
Engineering has misfortune to be among....
Therefore , if there exists known technical risk associated with any material object or activity , it has to be informed, analyzed, calculated and put into design. Otherwise, travesting Czekhov: " if there is a rifle hanging on the wall, you may be sure someone will take it and shoot"...
Coming back to the essence of this article: the Conjecture is , that apart from all known damage forms ( and these are: overstressing, fatigue, aging, thermal/radiological/ electromagnetic - decay) there is one new , which has to be placed into handbooks of material science. We may give it tentative name "Information Flux Damage" (albeit it slightly wrongly suggests that flux intensity is important ,whereas it seems rather information string prevails).
Since the early days of civilization, but with dramatic exponential growth in recent 50 years, humans saturate their surrounding with information flow. It usually has some physical shape (must it really?): on magnetic or optical disk, or electromagnetic wave cut into "zeros" & "1-s" pieces, solid state polarisation , quantum states arranged in organized way , or any other thinkable method to differentiate pre-arranged order from background natural chaos.
How matter interacts with information on molecular level ? Well,good question... An enlightened , although non-scientific reader , who gets through the maze of recent physics publications will notice that at the very bottom of our known universe the difference between matter and energy starts to blurr, and the matter seems to be conglomerate of energy and information. Unless energy itself is not only "instruction" on possible states...
But I do not want to navigate in these unchartered waters, where - I have to admit - I'm only an amateur skipper.
On practical side - if the designer of material product is aware that his object may get damaged with no other reasons than low-energy information transfer , he must take it into consideration by projecting : safety factor, reliability, design age, redundancy, operational instruction , and some other , application-related aspects.
Apparently , this practical approach has all in common with mastering formerly acknowledged material - strength risks: since we found out that repeated number of cycles induced fatigue damage, the logic solution was to put limit to number of cycles within design life.
However, the discussed subject is more complicated : let's make a short trip into not-so-far future and imagine the world where any owner of advanced PC & advanced software may inflict, at will, micro-damage to material structure of any physical object on the other side of the globe - car brakes, train wheels, lift rope, etc,etc...
Will he (or she) use this opportunity? But sure, look only into Facebook .....
