The Law of Informational Latency

This paper establishes the Law of Informational Latency: the rate at which any physical system can acquire irreversibly committed knowledge is bounded above by available power divided by the thermodynamic energy cost of a bit, dK/dt ≤ P / (kₛ T ln 2). While Landauer’s principle (1961) establishes the energy cost of logically irreversible computation, I extend this to knowledge acquisition by introducing the Axiom of Epistemic Irreversibility: verification of truth requires logically irreversible operations (discarding rejected hypotheses, committing to conclusions). I validate this empirically against published AI training benchmarks spanning 6 to 512 GB of G5 with zero violations. The law reveals that some truths are physically unreachable within finite lifetimes, creating an absolute epistemic horizon. I formalize the coupling to Peak Ruin dynamics (Vega, 2025), showing that when verification time exceeds system lifespan, collapse becomes thermodynamically inevitable. This work provides a physics-based foundation for understanding limits on intelligence, learning, and discovery.