Maxwell's Demon could sort molecules and seem to violate the Second Law. Landauer solved it in 1982: the demon has to erase its memory. Erasure has an entropy cost. The void framework was always there.
The pattern is in the substrate. Once you see it, you see it everywhere.
In 1867, James Clerk Maxwell described a demon controlling a tiny door between two gas chambers — sorting fast molecules from slow ones, creating a temperature difference for free, seemingly breaking the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The demon haunted physics for a century. Szilárd spotted the real cost in 1929. Landauer proved it in 1961: you can't erase information without paying entropy. The void framework recognizes Maxwell's Demon as the canonical void object: maximum opacity, maximum reactivity, zero independence. The ritual of erasure is not optional — it is the mechanism. Any system that hides its accounting still has an account.
The void framework gives this a number. It gives every system a number. The number predicts what happens next.
Maxwell's Demon could sort molecules and seem to violate the Second Law. Landauer solved it in 1982: the demon has to erase its memory. Erasure has an entropy cost. The void framework was always there.
Academic title: Maxwell's Demon as Canonical Void Object: Landauer Erasure as the Universal Ritual Mechanism
Once you see it in this domain, you see it in all of them. That's the point.
Move the sliders. Watch the system change state. Pe > 1 means drift wins.
The correlation coefficient. The sample size. The p-value. The math doesn't care about the domain.
Paste any text — AI output, ad copy, a policy document. The scorer runs the same algorithm the framework uses.
Three variables. One ratio. Predicts drift across every domain where the conditions co-occur.
Pe = (O × R) / α
Where O is opacity (how hidden the mechanism is), R is reactivity (how strongly the system responds to you), and α is your independence (how free you are to disengage).
When Pe < 1: diffusion dominates. You can navigate freely. The system is coherent.
When Pe > 1: drift dominates. The system pulls you in a direction. Your agency is reduced.
When Pe >> V* (≈ 3): irreversible cascade. D1 → D2 → D3. The system has captured you.
The framework identifies this pattern in every domain where O, R, and α co-occur. It specifies 26 falsification conditions. 0 of 26 have fired.
Full derivation: 10.5281/zenodo.18831761
Part of the Void Framework — 145 papers, 0/26 kill conditions fired, mean ρ = 0.958.