Energy-Information Equivalence and the Principle of Universal Substrate Computing

This paper advances the theoretical proposition that information and energy may constitute inseparable aspects of a single physical reality, rather than merely correlated quantities. Drawing on Landauer's principle, the Shannon-Boltzmann entropy identity, and Wheeler's "it from bit" paradigm, we conjecture that every energy state is simultaneously an information state — a position consistent with established physics, though a complete formal equivalence remains an open question. From this conjecture, we propose the framework of Universal Substrate Computing (USC), in which any energy medium — electromagnetic, acoustic, fluidic, chemical, mechanical, biological, or quantum — can in principle serve as a computational substrate. We further identify the speculative but tractable challenge of a Universal Transductive Material (UTM) capable of interfacing multiple energy domains simultaneously. This theoretical framework is presented as a hypothesis-generating proposal intended to motivate experimental and theoretical investigation, and its deeper claims await formal verification.