The Principle of Transductive Persistence

Metastable systems—from glasses and polymers to biological networks—remember their past in ways classical thermodynamics cannot explain. My theory introduces history-augmented states, a framework that quantifies how pathway information is stored in the environment and calculates the minimum work needed to erase it. Beyond the conventional Landauer limit, I identify a Memory Tax arising from kinetic barriers, revealing why non-equilibrium systems retain memory over long timescales. This approach unifies seemingly disparate phenomena—hysteresis in materials, aging in polymers, and epigenetic memory in biology—under a single, predictive principle: the Principle of Transductive Persistence. It predicts linear scaling of erasure work with pathway information and universal behaviors across systems, offering a quantitative roadmap for designing materials and understanding biological information storage. In short, this theory transforms our understanding of information persistence in matter, showing that memory is not just a metaphor—it is a thermodynamically measurable property of the physical world.