APF Paper 3 — Entropy, Time, and Accumulated Cost

Admissibility Physics — Entropy, Time, and Accumulated Cost (Ledger Works) This Zenodo community collects research outputs associated with Admissibility Physics, with primary focus on Paper 3 — Entropy, Time, and Accumulated Cost as Capacity Accounting and the ledger structure it establishes. Paper 3 introduces the accounting layer of the framework. Building on the finite enforceability principle (Paper 1) and non-closure under composition (Paper 2), it defines entropy as irreversibly committed correlation capacity at interfaces. Entropy is not treated as uncertainty, probability, or coarse-grained ignorance, but as a pre-probabilistic ledger quantity: capacity that has been committed to stabilizing distinctions and can no longer be freely reallocated. From this definition, Paper 3 derives irreversibility as a structural consequence of record formation. When correlations become redundantly enforced across interfaces, the capacity supporting them becomes locked, restricting future admissible configurations. The accumulation of such irreversible commitments induces a partial ordering on admissible states, which is identified with time. Time is not assumed as a background parameter; it emerges wherever irreversible ledger commitments occur and is undefined where they do not. No assumptions are made about dynamics, spacetime geometry, probability, or quantum mechanics. The paper establishes the ledger constraints that any subsequent representation must respect, regardless of the formalism used. Area laws, saturation behavior, and Page-like transitions arise directly from interface-localized capacity and non-closure, without appeal to microstates or statistical ensembles. All subsequent works in this community rely on the ledger structure introduced in Paper 3. Later papers show how quantum probabilities, variational dynamics, and geometric description become admissible only in regimes where ledger commitments are smooth and locally additive, and how these representations fail at saturation boundaries, horizons, and measurement-like transitions. This community serves as a curated, citable archive centered on the ledger foundations of Admissibility Physics. Paper 3 functions as the accounting backbone of the program: the point at which finite enforceability becomes entropy, irreversibility, and temporal structure. Core papers are frozen where noted; companion papers, mathematical appendices, figures, and computational artifacts document derivations, regime conditions, and structural consequences.