Landauer Irreversibility as an Operational Substrate for Entropic-Force Formulations Toward a Microscopic Interpretation of Screen Entropy

This paper proposes an operational interpretation of the screen entropy used in entropic-force formulations of fundamental interactions. In approaches such as Verlinde’s entropic gravity, force laws are recovered from entropy gradients assigned to holographic or informational screens, but the microscopic physical meaning of that entropy is usually left unspecified. The central proposal of this work is that Landauer’s principle can provide such an interpretation: screen entropy may be understood as an effective count of irreversible physical transitions, measured in units of k_B ln 2. In this framework, the entropy assigned to a screen is not treated as abstract information, but as the operational cost associated with registration, coarse-graining, thermalization, or encoding processes. A covariant irreversibility current is introduced to describe the entropy contribution across a hypersurface, and different interaction channels are interpreted as different effective modes of irreversible screen registration. The proposal does not claim to derive the Standard Model interactions, nor does it replace the unitary microscopic dynamics of quantum field theory. Instead, it offers a conservative bridge between entropic-force models, information thermodynamics, and Landauer irreversibility. As a concrete normalization, the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of a Schwarzschild black hole is expressed as a Landauer count, giving approximately 10^77 irreversible units for a solar-mass black hole. The framework is presented as a possible microscopic substrate for entropy gradients in entropic-force formulations, rather than as a completed unification theory.