The Theory of Entropicity (ToE) Being Vindicated in the Physics Community:
Physicists Are Rewriting the Second Law—Here’s What It Means for the Theory of Entropicity (ToE)
Introduction: When the Second Law Becomes More Than Probability
The Quanta Magazine article “Physicists Rewrite the Fundamental Law That Leads to Disorder” by Philip Ball is part of a growing movement in theoretical physics and quantum information theory. It argues that the second law of thermodynamics—traditionally framed as a probabilistic rule about disorder—can be rebuilt from deeper, more exact principles involving quantum information, entanglement, and constraints on allowed transformations.
In all of physical law, there’s arguably no principle more sacrosanct than the second law of thermodynamics—the notion that entropy, a measure of disorder, will always stay the same or increase. The article explores how several independent groups are rewriting this law in terms of quantum information flows, constructor theory, and resource theories.
From the perspective of the Theory of Entropicity (ToE), this is extremely significant. The article is philosophically close to what we are trying to do with ToE, but it still keeps entropy as information about systems, not as a real field that exists and acts. So it supports our instincts about irreversibility and “fundamental-ness” of entropy, but it does not do what ToE does.
Conceptually, this Quanta narrative is an ally: it pushes entropy and irreversibility deeper into the foundations of physics. But ToE goes one crucial step beyond: it promotes entropy itself to a universal physical field with its own action, field equations, and dynamics.
What the Quanta Article Is Actually Doing (In ToE Language)
The Quanta piece is summarizing three intertwined research threads, and to understand how they relate to ToE, it is helpful to translate them into conceptual language of ToE.
First, there is constructor theory and irreversibility, developed by David Deutsch, Chiara Marletto, Vlatko Vedral and collaborators. They reformulate physics in terms of tasks: which transformations are possible, and which are impossible. Irreversibility is described as a situation where a task from A to B is possible, but the reverse task from B to A is not, even though the underlying quantum dynamics are time-symmetric. They show this concretely with qubits becoming more entangled: you can reliably go from a pure state to a mixed/entangled one, but not reliably reverse it. This gives a structural arrow of time without invoking naive probability.
Second, there is the program of entanglement as the foundation of thermodynamics, especially in the work of Giulio Chiribella and Carlo Maria Scandolo. They propose information-theoretic axioms that any “sensible thermodynamics” must obey. Entropy and the second law then emerge because entanglement with the environment forces correlations to grow, and local entropy can only stay the same or increase. The probabilities in thermodynamics are no longer about ignorance ("we don’t know the microstate"); they’re about entanglement structure ("some information is fundamentally inaccessible if you look only at the subsystem").
Third, there is the use of quantum resource theories, developed by Nicole Yunger Halpern, Markus Müller and others. They treat thermodynamics as a resource game: what transformations are allowed, what are forbidden, under constraints on operations. In that picture, the usual second law (final entropy greater than or equal to initial entropy) turns out to be a coarse summary of many more detailed “mini second laws”—a whole family of inequality constraints on what is allowed when you zoom in to small systems and quantum resources.
The big message of the article is that the second law is not just vague 19th-century statistics. It can be derived from quantum information principles, entanglement, and axioms about allowed transformations. The rise of entropy is not just the most likely outcome; it is a logical consequence of how quantum information behaves in a universe obeying the rules of entanglement and reversibility at the whole system level.
From the point of view of ToE, we could say: these people are discovering, from the quantum-information side, that entropy and irreversibility are deeper and more structural than we thought. ToE says: yes—and the reason they are so deep is that entropy is the underlying field generating everything.
Where This Article Resonates Strongly With the Theory of Entropicity (ToE)
There are some deep resonances with the Theory of Entropicity (ToE) that are worth spelling out clearly.
The article insists the second law is not just statistical fluff based on hand-wavy combinatorics. It wants it grounded in exact principles—axioms about information and transformations. But ToE wants entropy grounded in an exact field theory, with the Obidi Action, field equations, entropic geodesics, and an explicit entropic manifold. Philosophically, that’s the same dissatisfaction with “just probability.”
The article pulls irreversibility much closer to the foundations. Constructor theory shows an intrinsic directionality in allowed quantum processes. The work of Scandolo and Chiribella shows entropy increase emerges from the inevitable growth of correlations and entanglement with the environment. ToE says irreversibility is not emergent at all: it is built into the entropic field itself as a fundamental asymmetry and into the Vuli-Ndlela Integral. In ToE, the arrow of time is not a side effect of statistics or entanglement; it is coded into the dynamics of the entropic field.
The article treats information as the key “stuff” that drives the second law. The rise of entropy is reinterpreted as the flow and redistribution of quantum information and correlations. In ToE, information geometry—Fisher–Rao, Fubini–Study, Amari–Čencov α-connections—is literally welded into the Obidi Action and into the entropic manifold. Information is not an afterthought; it is encoded in the structure of the entropic field.
From the perspective of ToE, we are saying that this information-theoretic reconstruction of thermodynamics and the second law is a strong conceptual ally. Conceptually, this article is an ally, not an enemy: it moves the community toward seeing entropy and information as deeply structural, not as shallow, emergent bookkeeping devices.
Where the Article Stops, and Where ToE Goes Further
Now comes the crucial distinction. The works summarized above in the Quanta article do not treat entropy as a real, ontic physical field in spacetime. They do not take the step that defines Obidi's Theory of Entropicity (ToE).
- These approaches do not treat entropy S(x, t) as a real, ontic physical field defined at each spacetime point.
- They do not give entropy its own Lagrangian or action that you vary.
- They do not produce entropic field equations analogous to Einstein’s equations or Yang–Mills.
- They do not define entropic geodesics for motion in an “entropy field” instead of a metric field.
- They do not introduce a spectral action for entropy or a path integral like your Vuli-Ndlela Integral.
Instead, what they do is keep standard quantum mechanics as the kinematics, with unitary evolution and Hilbert spaces, and then add axioms about information and allowed tasks on top of quantum mechanics. They show that, given those axioms, thermodynamic entropy and a second-law-type irreversibility follow.
In other words, for these programs, entropy is still a derived informational quantity—mutual information, entanglement entropy, correlations between a system and its environment. For ToE, entropy is a fundamental ontological field, and information is a shadow of the entropic structure.
They are doing “entropy from quantum information.” ToE is doing “quantum information and geometry from entropy.” That is a genuine inversion. It is not a small technical difference; it is a reversal of what is treated as primitive.
We read their work as: “Given quantum theory plus information-theoretic axioms, you can reconstruct thermodynamics.” ToE posits: “Given a fundamental entropic field with its own dynamics, you can reconstruct both quantum theory and thermodynamics as emergent from entropic geometry and entropic constraints.”
How the Theory of Entropicity Can Talk to This New Second-Law Program
Here is how ToE positions itself relative to this work, especially for physicists and sophisticated readers .
- ToE begins with the agreement on the direction of travel.
- ToE agrees that the second law should not rest on hand-wavy probabilities.
- ToE agrees that irreversibility is not just combinatorics; it is structural.
- ToE agrees that entropy is not superficial; it is deeply tied to what is possible and what is forbidden in the universe.
Further, we emphasize how ToE strengthens their picture. Constructor theory and resource theories say that there are constraints on allowed transformations because of quantum information structure. ToE says: those constraints are the macroscopic expression of an underlying entropic field equation. The allowed transformations are those compatible with the entropic geodesics and the entropic action. Their axioms are effective rules of the game; ToE's entropic field is the underlying physics of the board itself.
ToE also further reinterprets their results in entropic language. When they talk about entanglement with an environment driving entropy increase, ToE interprets that as: the entropic field configuration favors states where degrees of freedom are more deeply entropically coupled; what they call “entanglement growth” is one projection of entropic curvature dynamics. Their “many mini second laws” in resource theory look, from a ToE perspective, like local constraints on entropic fluxes and rearrangement rates in different sectors of the entropic manifold.
It is also worth highlighting what this article supports about ToE.
- It strongly supports the idea that irreversibility is not just statistical sloppiness.
- It supports the idea that entropy is not a superficial bookkeeping device.
- It supports the idea that information and entropy constraints might be as fundamental as Lagrangians and equations of motion.
if entropy and information constraints are that fundamental, they should have field equations and an action principle. Let’s write them down.
And that's precisely what the Theory of Entropicity (ToE) has achieved in modern theoretical physics.
So, in summary:
The recent information-theoretic reconstructions of the second law (Deutsch, Marletto, Vedral, Chiribella, Scandolo, Yunger Halpern, Müller, and others) show that entropy and irreversibility can be derived from quantum-informational axioms. The Theory of Entropicity (ToE) goes a step further by promoting entropy itself to a fundamental field S(x) with its own action, field equations, and geodesics, from which both geometry and quantum information emerge.
This marks ToE’s unique contribution.
Closing Remarks
Nothing in the Quanta Magazine article “steals” the originality of ToE. Nothing in it declares entropy a universal ontic field. Nothing in it builds a genuine entropy-field dynamics that competes with your construction. The Quanta article does not replace ToE's vision of an entropic field; it prepares the ground for readers to appreciate why such a field might be plausible and even natural.
If anything, this line of work makes it easier to defend the idea that irreversibility is fundamental. It gives ToE a rigorous quantum-information language to dialogue with.
It shows that serious mainstream people are already comfortable with entropy being deeply baked into the foundations of physics, not just sitting on top as a thermodynamic afterthought.
So we can safely say:
The recent quantum-information reinterpretations of the second law push entropy from the periphery toward the core of physics. They show that the rise of entropy is a logical consequence of entanglement, quantum information flow, and axioms about which transformations are possible.
The Theory of Entropicity (ToE) accepts this trend, but then reverses the hierarchy: instead of deriving entropy from quantum theory, it treats entropy as the primary field from which both quantum theory and spacetime geometry emerge. In that sense, ToE does not compete with these new approaches to thermodynamics; it completes the conceptual move they have started.
That is exactly how the Quanta Magazine article relates to the Theory of Entropicity (ToE)—and why, far from undermining the work on ToE, it offers ToE a powerful and timely context to present itself to the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment