Transduction, Time, and Aging: Capacity and Record at the QD–SD Interface

This paper develops the Dual-Domain Cosmology by separating two quantities that ordinary language calls “time”. The first is proper time, geometric and universal: every clock carried along a worldline measures the same proper time, whatever it is made of. In the dual-domain reading, proper time measures the interface’s capacity for transduction: with an anchor’s rest energy, the Margolus–Levitin bound turns it into a maximum number of distinguishable state changes. The second quantity is the record count: the number of irreversible transduction events a system actually undergoes. It is specific to the system, set chiefly by chemistry under terrestrial conditions, and, under a stated record-cost assumption, bounded from above by entropy production through Landauer’s principle. Aging is identified with the unrepaired part of the record count. The separation is consistent with relativity and precision clock physics. Temperature shows the difference: a ten-kelvin rise makes a cesium clock read slow by about one part in 10^14, through kinematic time dilation of its thermally moving atoms, while it nearly doubles a typical chemical rate. For a resting human in steady state, the Landauer ceiling on records lies about thirty orders of magnitude below the quantum ceiling on capacity. For whole-body protein turnover, the maintenance cost lies about an order of magnitude above its Landauer floor, consistent with an independent estimate for translation. The main result is this separation, with a quantitative bound on each side; it is not a new dynamical equation, and it makes no prediction beyond standard physics. Keywords: dual-domain cosmology; philosophy of physics; proper time; Landauer principle; quantum speed limit; thermodynamics of aging