  Shape is an important feature of physical systems although very seldom it is
addressed in the framework of a quantitative description approach. In this
paper we propose to interpret the shape of things as a physical manifestation
of the content of information associated with each thing and show that a change
of shape in a physical system is necessarily connected with a change of its
entropy and thus involves energy. We estimate the amount of energy dissipated
during a shape change and propose experimental tests to be performed in
nanoscale systems, to verify this prediction by measuring the expected
dissipation in few simple cases.
