Entropy-driven irreversibility from limits on information reconstruction

Qiren Zhang

Marriam Naeem

We develop a theoretical framework in which physical irreversibility is understood as a failure of information reconstruction rather than information destruction. We argue that physical systems pass through three distinct regimes: coherent quantum information, classically accessible information stabilized by decoherence and redundancy, and thermodynamically dispersed information that remains globally encoded but locally unrecoverable. Transitions between these regimes are driven by entropy growth, environmental coupling, and computational complexity, imposing sharp limits on reconstructability even under globally unitary dynamics. This framework clarifies the physical meaning of irreversibility and provides a unified interpretation of memory formation, quantum measurement, thermalization, and black hole evaporation.

Göran Lindblad

Wenjun Luo

The contradiction between the thermodynamic arrow of time and microscopic dynamical reversibility is a core problem in statistical physics. Within the framework of connectivity engineering, this paper proposes a new mechanism: irreversible accumulation of subsystem entropy caused by topological quenching. We numerically simulate the cyclic switching of a one-dimensional spin network between topological steps k=1 and k=4. Results show that each switch from the highly connected state to the frustrated state leads to an irreversible "fall" of information into the local entanglement space; when switched back to the initial topology, the subsystem entanglement entropy cannot recover to its initial value, but instead surges from 0 to approximately 2.96 and remains in the saturation regime, exhibiting a unidirectional entropy accumulation. Since the theoretical maximum entropy of this subsystem is 3.0, this irreversible saturation directly reveals the limit of information coarse-graining. The above results prove that the microscopic origin of the arrow of time is precisely the information scrambling caused by the irreversibility of underlying geometric topological reconstruction.

Stig Stenholm