Why do some particles live almost forever, while others vanish in a tiny fraction of a second?
A neutron can survive for nearly fifteen minutes.
A muon lasts two millionths of a second.
A tau particle disappears almost instantaneously.
And certain resonances blink out faster than anything we can meaningfully time.
The Standard Model of particle physics gives us ways to calculate these lifetimes, but it doesn’t explain why the lifetimes are what they are. The answers depend on dozens of coupling constants and assumptions that we measure in experiments and then plug into equations. It works — brilliantly — but it isn’t very satisfying. We’re left with a universe whose deepest timing mechanisms seem arbitrary.
TPB (Ticks-Per-Bit) offers a different way of looking at the problem. Instead of thinking of particles as little objects with built-in decay rates, TPB imagines that every particle carries a kind of identity bit — a tiny unit of information that defines what the particle is. Time, in this picture, isn’t continuous; it moves in tiny discrete steps called “ticks.” At each tick, the identity bit has a small chance to “flip.” When that happens, the particle decays.
The astonishing thing is that this simple idea leads to a universal formula:
lifetime = (difficulty of flipping the identity bit) × (tick duration)
In other words, how long a particle lives depends on two things:
- How hard it is for its identity to change (this is like a barrier or resistance inside an information landscape)
- How fast the universe’s underlying “clock ticks”
This is where things get exciting.
Recently, we showed that you can take a simple, ordinary shape of a potential — the kind physicists have studied for decades — and use it to calculate how the “difficulty” of flipping that identity bit should depend on the particle’s mass. And remarkably, this geometric calculation predicts a very specific relationship:
Heavier particles have identity barriers that shrink in a precise logarithmic pattern.
This wasn’t guessed or adjusted to fit the data.
It came straight out of the geometry.
Even more striking, the geometric prediction matches the behaviour of real particles:
- It explains why lighter leptons (like muons) live long compared to the much heavier tau
- It reproduces the huge imbalance in the way pions decay into electrons vs. muons
- And it does so using the same internal logic, without changing the rules from one particle to the next
This is the first hint that particle lifetimes — some of the most mysterious numbers in physics — might not be arbitrary after all. They may be telling us something deep about the information geometry behind the world: a hidden landscape of wells, ridges, and barriers that shapes the behaviour of everything we call matter.
Is this the final theory?
No — it’s the beginning of one.
But having two independent signals match real physics using nothing more than geometric reasoning is unusual — especially in an area as data-driven as particle-lifetime physics. It suggests we may be touching the edges of a new way of describing the universe: one where information, not fields or particles, is the most primitive ingredient.
If that’s true, then every decay event isn’t just matter falling apart — it’s information transforming. And the “clock” that runs the universe isn’t the smooth flow of time we imagine, but a hidden rhythm of tiny ticks beneath reality.
The next step will be to refine the potentials, explore more particle families, and see how far this idea goes. But the initial signs are intriguing:
a simple geometric principle, applied in the right informational framework, may be enough to explain why the universe decays exactly the way it does.