Quantum Commitment Thermodynamics and Physical Selection

SCQG paper 15 of 28 This paper follows the energy and entropy changes involved in creating, retaining, reading, using and resetting quantum records. It treats the pointers, memories, controllers, work stores and reservoirs as physical systems and counts each energy transfer once. Forward actionability means resolving uncertainty into a distinction that a later operation can use. Local grounding depends on that action making the resolved distinction available. The paper derives exact balances for finite quantum interactions, reset with and without retained side information, and autonomous control. It connects record lifetime and decoding accuracy to the information available for later use, and identifies the instrument-dependent information that enters feedback-work bounds. It also develops capacity-proportional selection, in which an outcome’s probability is proportional to the physical capacity available for that outcome. For nonconstant outcome probabilities, respecting ordinary mixtures of preparations forces this selection law to have positive-operator-valued measure (POVM) form. Agreement with the Born rule then requires the normalized capacity operators to equal the measurement’s outcome effects. The paper gives first-arrival, stationary and quantum-jump realizations and states their no-signalling conditions. The Stoney action equals αℏ, giving the uncertainty bound ΔX ΔP ≥ 1/(2α). Further results relate screen fluctuations, measurement precision, trajectory probabilities and entropy export. The complete physical construction keeps its reservoirs and work sources within their own reciprocal branch and supplies the defined stress interface used by the gravitational papers.