In the quantum world, a fact becomes objective when its value is imprinted on many independent fragments of the environment, like a notice posted on hundreds of bulletin boards across the city. Each copy alone adds no new information, but it changes the rules of the game for anyone trying to erase that information.

The authors considered a cloud of records entropy and divided it into blocks that cannot be controlled jointly. They found that erasing information at a fixed temperature costs a local controller more work than a global one. The difference is exactly equal to the energy of thermal motion of particles multiplied by a measure of statistical dependence between blocks. This extra cost is called the thermodynamic charge of factuality.

The magnitude of the charge depends on the access architecture. One person sees all the bulletin boards at once, while another sees only one. To erase a record, the second person must visit each board individually, and each extra step costs energy. Thus, redundancy of records becomes a measurable resource — work that can be calculated in joules. The study does not change quantum mechanics but points out the thermodynamic consequences of how access to information is structured.