The Last Evaporation: Planck Remnants as Cosmological Seeds in Empty Spacetime

Abstract

A black hole spends 10^100 years boiling itself down to the simplest possible remnant – and the process is not merely like information erasure, it is information erasure, running at exactly the thermodynamic minimum: the first law of black hole mechanics prices each shed unit of horizon entropy at precisely Landauer's bound. A black hole is a perfect Landauer engine, and because erasure at the minimum is the signature of information relocated rather than destroyed, the exact payment is an audit trail of unitarity. What remains when the erasure runs out of operand is the remnant: three entangled links in a closed configuration, each as strong as the other two permit – maximally correlated subject to closure. That's the floor, and it is a genuine deadlock, not a decree: shedding a link requires correlating outward first, correlating outward requires spare capacity, and the closed triangle has none. No further radiation is possible below it. It's pre-geometric: no space, no time, no dimensions inside. The remnant sits in the parent universe as an inert speck. It can't expand, because it's a particle in an existing universe, and particles don't undergo the cosmological expansion that universes do. Meanwhile the parent universe is slowly dismantling itself: accelerating expansion severs entanglement at the cosmological horizon, and the severing consumes spacetime's own substrate – a cost counted in bits, its energy output only faint radiation at the horizon's own temperature. Eventually the parent dissolves. Now the speck is alone. It isn't a particle anymore, because there is no universe for it to be a particle in. It's everything. And a sum over geometries, with nothing else in existence, has exactly one source of information: the speck's three bits. Conditioned on that and nothing more, the gravitational path integral favors expanding three-dimensional space – and a new universe begins. A three-bit speck should produce the same physics every time: constants aren't inherited, they're rebuilt. But the specific pattern of quantum fluctuations is a fresh draw each cycle, so every universe shares the same laws and carries its own history. Every black hole makes one speck. Every speck makes one universe. The cycle repeats. Companion papers make the picture quantitative: the three-link seed conditions the sum from which each universe is drawn, and the draw's statistics are computable – the spectral tilt (with ln 2, the seed's bit, measured in it at 0.004σ), the perturbation amplitude (0.01σ), and a tensor-to-scalar ratio reported as 0.0297 ± 0.0005 (physical 0.0281 ± 0.0005), about 7% under the current combined limit and decided by operating experiments within years. And the cosmological constant itself: the seed carries one quantum of action, the necessary first move of the construction consumes a quarter of it, and the remaining three-quarters is the dark energy – the total action of all dark energy, over all space and time, is 0.75ℏ. The scenario stands or falls with those numbers. The Program Corpus The Last Evaporation: Planck Remnants as Cosmological Seeds in Empty Spacetime - 10.5281/zenodo.19324262 Cosmological Structure Without Inflation: The Perturbation Spectrum from Pre-Geometric Construction - 10.5281/zenodo.19513896 One-Loop Identities on the S4 Instanton - 10.5281/zenodo.20045607 The Ignition Transition: From the No-Boundary Saddle to Radiation Domination - 10.5281/zenodo.20559451 The Ignition Inventory: Defect Energy and Static Topology - 10.5281/zenodo.20559916 Epistemic Inventory and Taxonomy of Claims - 10.5281/zenodo.21324530 Cosmology from a Three-Bit Seed: The Predictions and Their Falsification Gates - 10.5281/zenodo.21270529 Replication Package – Cosmology from a Three-Bit Seed - 10.5281/zenodo.21296026