MetaTime v41: Quantum Transitions as Information Erasure – Deriving the Photon from Landauer's Principle

Standard physics correctly predicts that an excited electron decays to a lower orbital and emitsa photon, yet its explanatory nucleus is tautological: “the system minimizes energy.” Energyis treated as primitive, and the reason the Universe exports energy to the vacuum is delegatedto spontaneous emission postulates or to an external reservoir, without an information-theoreticaccounting of the discarded degrees of freedom. Building on MetaTime Modelo 3, where theStandard Model is formulated as a boundary open effective field theory (open-EFT) with a causal nonMarkovian influence functional characterized by a running latency ΓL(µ), we propose a mechanisticreinterpretation: an excited orbital is not merely “higher energy” but a state of higher algorithmiccomplexity—a larger bulk entanglement wedge footprint required to stabilize its boundary geometryagainst vacuum noise. Orbital relaxation is a compression event that erases a definite informationbudget ∆I into the traced-out bath. By Landauer’s principle, erasing ∆I bits must dissipate energyE ≥ kBTeff ln 2 ∆I. We identify the emitted photon as this mandatory Landauer export and treat itsfrequency ω as the bath’s erasure clock rate, yielding the exchange relation Eγ ≃ ℏω ≃ kBTeff ln 2 ∆I.The Planck relation thus emerges as an informational exchange rate: Planck’s constant is the “priceof a bit” evaluated at the vacuum’s effective erasure temperature. For the hydrogen Lyman-αtransition 2p → 1s in free vacuum, defining ∆I via a Jensen–Shannon information metric on orbitalprobability densities gives ∆I2p→1s = 0.64079 bits and implies an effective erasure temperatureTeff ≃ 2.66 × 105 K. We outline falsifiable extensions in which Teff and ΓL become environmentallytunable (cavity QED, dense media), producing correlated deviations in line shapes and relaxationpathways beyond standard QED vacuum fluctuations.