Energy and the vacuum in a Principle-of-Least-Information framework with a 7D two-time Janus embedding as an optional realization

The status of energy and the vacuum remains conceptually subtle across
modern physics: energy is a symmetry charge, yet global conservation is
nontrivial in general relativity; quantum field theory defines the vacuum
through renormalization in a way that makes absolute offsets ambiguous; and
the Casimir effect is often misread as direct evidence for a large gravitating
vacuum energy. This paper summarizes how these issues are treated in a
Principle of Least Information (PLI) framework equipped with an auxiliary
influence sector and an optional 7D two-time (Janus) embedding. PLI is used
as a model-selection prior: among empirically adequate effective descriptions,
the preferred one minimizes total description length of laws and boundary
conditions. In this setting, (i) energy is emergent as the Noether charge asso-
ciated with translations along an operational time direction selected within
an otherwise rotation-invariant time-plane; (ii) reduced dynamics obtained
by tracing out the influence sector are completely positive and trace preserv-
ing, yielding an explicit energy-balance identity with system–environment
exchange; and (iii) the vacuum is characterized as the lowest-information
admissible configuration given boundary conditions, with observable effects
arising from boundary-dependent differences (Casimir/Lifshitz) rather than
absolute offsets. We compare the resulting viewpoint with standard treat-
ments in classical mechanics, GR, QFT (including curved spacetime), and
semiclassical gravity, and we summarize empirical hooks and constraints.