The Universal Entropic Mass Principle - Hypothesis, Operational Cycle, and Multi-Scale Validation

The physical nature of information has progressively emerged as a central theme in modern physics. Landauer demonstrated that logically irreversible operations necessarily produce entropy, while black hole thermodynamics revealed that gravitating systems encode entropy geometrically. These developments suggest that information, entropy, and energy are deeply intertwined. In this work, we propose that mass itself acts as an \emph{operational informational constraint}. Any physical process capable of stabilizing, resetting, or maintaining a system of rest mass $m$ against excitations must dissipate a minimal amount of entropy, \[ \Sigma \ge \frac{m c^2}{k_B T_{\mathrm{eff}}}. \] It is important to stress that the Universal Entropic Mass Principle (UEMP) is not a reformulation of Landauer’s principle, which quantifies entropy production per logical bit erased. Instead, the UEMP establishes a continuous, system-level lower bound associated with the physical suppression of excitations across the rest-energy scale, independently of logical encoding.