At the deepest level, physics is not just about describing what happens—it is about understanding how facts come into existence. Every measurement, every recorded outcome, every event we call “real” shares a common feature: it is irreversible. Once a fact is formed, the alternatives that could have occurred are no longer accessible. This paper starts from that observation. It asks: if physical reality is built from irreversible events that select between distinguishable possibilities, what follows from that about the structure of the world before those events occur?
The VERSF framework takes this seriously and treats irreversible commitment as fundamental. A physical fact is not something revealed—it is something created through an entropy-producing process. That immediately places thermodynamics at the foundation: forming a fact has a minimum cost, and that cost is tied to the elimination of alternatives. Before commitment, those alternatives still exist in an unresolved state. The question then becomes: how do we describe that unresolved structure in a way that is consistent with the principles of distinguishability, observer invariance, and irreversibility?
What the paper shows is that once these thermodynamic constraints are imposed, the description of pre-commitment reality is tightly restricted. Any consistent measure of unresolved structure must obey a small set of rules: it cannot depend on arbitrary labels, it must behave smoothly under small changes, it must combine additively for independent systems, and it must remain consistent when alternatives are grouped together. These requirements are not added by hand—they follow directly from the structure of irreversible fact formation in VERSF. And when you follow them through, they lead uniquely to Shannon entropy.
This result reframes information theory completely. Entropy is not just a tool for describing uncertainty—it is the measure of physical alternatives that have not yet been eliminated by irreversible processes. When a fact is formed, that entropy is reduced, and the reduction has a physical cost. The familiar Landauer principle—linking information and thermodynamic entropy—appears here not as an independent postulate, but as a direct consequence of the framework: resolving information and producing entropy are the same physical process.
The broader significance is that this paper identifies the thermodynamic layer underlying the structure of physics. Previous work in the VERSF programme shows that quantum mechanics emerges as the minimal representation of physical reality under additional structural constraints. But that derivation assumes an information-theoretic description as input. What this paper shows is that this input is itself forced by thermodynamics. Before quantum mechanics enters, the structure of information is already fixed by the irreversible nature of fact formation.
Seen this way, physics becomes a layered story grounded in thermodynamics. At the base are irreversible commitments that create facts and define entropy. From this, information theory emerges as the unique description of unresolved alternatives. And from there, quantum mechanics emerges as the representation of that structure under the dynamics of the underlying substrate. The takeaway is not just that information plays a role in physics—it is that thermodynamics, information, and physical reality are all expressions of the same underlying process: the irreversible formation of facts.