Atoms stay together because the universe is running a cosmic error-correction code that prevents information from being lost.
Nuclear binding energy is usually described as a powerful force between protons and neutrons. This new Parity Theorem suggests that the stability of matter is actually a result of information deduplication. The vacuum itself acts like a computer that corrects errors to keep atoms from falling apart. This theory allows researchers to calculate the mass of different elements without using any fudge factors or assumptions. It implies that the physical world is an emergent property of a much deeper information-processing system.
Nuclear Binding from Quantum Error Correction: The Parity Theorem and the Weizsäcker Stability Line
SSRN · 6708181
We argue that nuclear binding energy is information deduplication in a quantum error-correcting vacuum. In the Mass-Energy-Information (M/E/I) framework of Part I, particle mass equals fault-tolerant verification cost on a [[192,130,3]] CSS code. If mass is verification cost, binding energy is verification savings: the reduction when two nucleons share stabilizer constraints.The central result is a theorem: only proton-neutron bonds deduplicate. A p-n pair has combined CSS parity 1⊕0=1 (non-triv