Entropy Without Statistics: Realization as the Source of Irreversibility

This paper argues that entropy is not the physical cause of irreversibility, but its accounting description. Building on a strict process–event distinction developed across a series of prior works, it shows that statistical description becomes meaningful only after physical events have been realized through stabilized environmental records at an energetic cost. Irreversibility is identified with the realization threshold at which a coherent process closes into an event, breaking operational reversibility via boundary fluxes to the environment. Within this framework, the classical Boltzmann interpretation is not rejected but strictly delimited: statistics does not generate the arrow of time, but quantifies reversibility already lost. The paper connects realization to symmetry breaking in the sense of Noether’s theorem and demonstrates consistency with quantum field theory, chemistry, Bose–Einstein condensation, and heuristic aspects of Dirac’s vacuum picture.