A Thermodynamic Foundation for the Second Law of Infodynamics

Vopson's "second law of infodynamics" proposes that information entropy decreases over time, with high-symmetry states representing minimum information entropy. This paper provides the thermodynamic mechanism: asymmetric states cost work to maintain.

Part 1 of the IPI Letters trilogy:

• Part 2: Black Hole Aperture — observer-relative time dilation
• Part 3: Cosmic Relaxation — cosmological origins

We derive a geometric maintenance bound showing that confining a system to a low-dimensional, asymmetric manifold requires continuous energy dissipation. The dissipation has two components: an informational term (bits removed) and a geometric contraction term governed by the Jacobian of the projection map.

Without work input, systems naturally relax toward high-dimensional, symmetric equilibrium where structure-information vanishes. This does not contradict the second law of thermodynamics—thermodynamic entropy increases in the heat bath precisely because structure-information is being dissipated.

The second law of infodynamics thus emerges as a shadow of the second law of thermodynamics: structure costs work, and in a dissipative universe, the path of least resistance is the path to symmetry.