MetaTime v41: Quantum Transitions as Information Erasure – Deriving the Photon from Landauer's Principle

Standard physics correctly predicts that an excited electron decays to a lower orbital and emits
a photon, yet its explanatory nucleus is tautological: “the system minimizes energy.” Energy
is treated as primitive, and the reason the Universe exports energy to the vacuum is delegated
to spontaneous emission postulates or to an external reservoir, without an information-theoretic
accounting of the discarded degrees of freedom. Building on MetaTime Modelo 3, where the
Standard Model is formulated as a boundary open effective field theory (open-EFT) with a causal nonMarkovian influence functional characterized by a running latency ΓL(µ), we propose a mechanistic
reinterpretation: an excited orbital is not merely “higher energy” but a state of higher algorithmic
complexity—a larger bulk entanglement wedge footprint required to stabilize its boundary geometry
against vacuum noise. Orbital relaxation is a compression event that erases a definite information
budget ∆I into the traced-out bath. By Landauer’s principle, erasing ∆I bits must dissipate energy
E ≥ kBTeff ln 2 ∆I. We identify the emitted photon as this mandatory Landauer export and treat its
frequency ω as the bath’s erasure clock rate, yielding the exchange relation Eγ ≃ ℏω ≃ kBTeff ln 2 ∆I.
The Planck relation thus emerges as an informational exchange rate: Planck’s constant is the “price
of a bit” evaluated at the vacuum’s effective erasure temperature. For the hydrogen Lyman-α
transition 2p → 1s in free vacuum, defining ∆I via a Jensen–Shannon information metric on orbital
probability densities gives ∆I2p→1s = 0.64079 bits and implies an effective erasure temperature
Teff ≃ 2.66 × 105 K. We outline falsifiable extensions in which Teff and ΓL become environmentally
tunable (cavity QED, dense media), producing correlated deviations in line shapes and relaxation
pathways beyond standard QED vacuum fluctuations.