Informational Gravity V: Origin and Fate of the Universe

This is the fifth paper in a series developing an interpretive framework in which spacetime, gravity, and thermodynamic phenomena emerge from the informational structure of bound energy. Paper IV established that the heat death converges to the network ground state, structurally identical to the pre-Big Bang state: both lack bound information, proper time, and emergent space. This paper draws four consequences from that structural identity. First, the question “what caused the Big Bang?” is identified as a fifth instance of the extrapolation-beyond-validity pattern running through the series: it presupposes an external temporal frame that does not exist if time is emergent (a diagnosis shared with existing timeless cosmologies, here embedded in the series’ informational framework). Second, the framework provides an ontological reading of Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology: the pre-Big Bang and post-heat death states are not merely conformally equivalent but structurally identical, because there is nothing to distinguish them. Third, the Past Hypothesis (the puzzle of low initial entropy) is reframed: thermodynamic entropy is not defined in the ground state, and the first configuration with bound information has minimal entropy as a natural consequence of minimal structure, though the fine-tuning question is reframed rather than eliminated. Fourth, the informational threshold for network genesis is identified as the first symmetry breaking that produces massive particles; the framework is agnostic about which sector (visible or dark) provides it. The paper makes no new testable predictions. Its ontribution is conceptual: it completes the series by tracing the framework’s implications to their cosmological limits and honestly identifying what it cannot explain.