Binding Energy, Critical Radii, & Information Maintenance Tax

Binding energies across all scales — nuclear, electromagnetic, gravitational — represent ongoing thermodynamic maintenance costs against entropy, following from Landauer's principle (E = k_B T ln 2 per bit). Each fundamental force imposes a characteristic "bankruptcy radius" where maintenance equals total energy: QCD confinement at ~1 fm, electromagnetic at the classical electron radius, and gravitational at the Schwarzschild radius. A complexity multiplier M(η,d) = φ^{2^{d-2}} × (1-η)^{-ρ*}, where ρ* = 4πφ²/10 ≈ 3.29 is the coupling constant from constraint geometry, quantifies organizational overhead. White dwarf trajectories toward the Chandrasekhar limit provide empirical test: geometric compression increases by factor 2.2 while organizational complexity explodes by factor 2200, indicating information bankruptcy drives instability. Independent analysis of the Montreal White Dwarf Database (5,519 objects) and Gaia DR3 (7,496 objects) identifies R/R_S ≈ 10³ as a discrete phase transition boundary, with anomaly-zone objects appearing systematically older than matched references (+103 Myr at 3.59σ; +58 Myr at 34.6σ). Type Ia supernova energy equals the Landauer cost of reorganizing phase space information from electron to neutron degeneracy — counting bits (ΔN ≈ 4.5 × 10⁵⁸) at shock temperature (T ~ 10⁹ K) gives E = 4.3 × 10⁴⁴ J, matching observed supernova energies.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.