Universe 2.0 Concept
Universe 2.0: Building a universe from nothing but space
In Universe 2.0 the only substance is space in the form of quanta.
Starting point: there should be one thing
Physics describes the universe with a zoo of entities — particles, fields, forces, spacetime geometry — each governed by its own rules. It works, but it feels patched together. A natural question: what if, at the bottom, there is only one thing?
This is not a new impulse. Monism — the idea that reality is fundamentally one substance — runs from the pre-Socratics through Spinoza to modern attempts at unification. The appeal is straightforward: if you can explain more with less, you probably should. One substance, one set of rules, everything else emergent.
So what could that one substance be? It needs to be something genuinely fundamental — not something that already presupposes other things. Particles won’t work; they need space to exist in. Fields won’t work either; they’re defined over spacetime. Energy is a property, not a substance. But space itself is interesting. Space doesn’t seem to need anything else to exist. And everything we observe — matter, radiation, forces — exists within space or as a property of space. What if space isn’t just the stage? What if it’s the entire show?
That’s the starting assumption: the universe is made of one thing — space — and that space comes in discrete chunks called quanta. No particles floating in a void, no separate fields layered on top. Just space, quantized.
Two rules and nothing else
If space is all there is, it needs some dynamics — otherwise you just have a static block of nothing-in-particular. What’s the simplest dynamics you could give it?
Two behaviors:
- Splitting. A quantum of space can, with some probability, become two quanta with the same properties.
- Merging. Two quanta of space can, with some probability, collapse back into one.
The probability of splitting is slightly higher than the probability of merging. Both probabilities are constant for now.
That’s the entire rulebook. Everything that follows — expansion, matter, gravity, time, motion, light — is a consequence of these two operations and the slight asymmetry between them.
How to picture a quantum of space
There are several useful mental models:
A fluid. Space as a fluid-like substance where each quantum is a droplet. Splits create new droplets; merges absorb them. The universe is this fluid and nothing more.
A superfluid. Like the fluid picture, but bulk motion produces no drag — only gradients in flow have physical consequences. This version most naturally produces gravity and time dilation.
A thread. Space as a one-dimensional thread that stretches, loops, and tangles. What we perceive as three-dimensional space is the ball of tangled thread. Knots become matter.
A graph. Each quantum is a node, connected to neighbors by edges. Splitting means a node copies itself with a new edge to the original. Merging means two nodes collapse into one, inheriting each other’s connections. No embedding space required.
All these pictures work. The fundamental rules behave the same way in each. For simplicity, we’ll mostly think of space as a fluid.
One thing is important across all models: these quanta are not floating in anything. The universe does not expand “into” anything. The quanta are the space.
Expansion: the universe that builds itself
The first thing that falls out of the rules: the universe expands.
Quanta split. One becomes two, two become four, and so on. The split probability sets the inflation rate.
Take two points in space. They don’t move — there’s no movement in the model yet. But space between them keeps splitting and growing. The distance between two points is just the number of quanta (hops) between them, and that count keeps increasing. The points drift apart.
This expansion accelerates. More space means more quanta available to split, which means more new space per unit time. Expansion feeds on itself. Two points that are far apart recede faster than two points that are close — exactly what we observe.
This is pure recession velocity: points separate because space itself grows, not because anything travels. Recession velocity can exceed the speed of light, and that’s fine — nothing is actually moving through space.
If the split probability is constant, proportions between all points stay uniform at any moment — the classic raisin-bread analogy, where doubling the bread doubles all raisin-to-raisin distances.
This is dark energy. No separate substance needed. The source of accelerating expansion is space itself, constantly making more of itself.
Quantum fluctuations: the warm vacuum
Now add the second rule. Quanta can also merge. The interplay of splitting and merging determines the character of the vacuum:
- Split equals merge → static universe, no net expansion.
- Split exceeds merge → expanding universe (our case).
- Merge exceeds split → contracting universe.
Even in equilibrium, this interplay creates a dynamic, fluctuating vacuum. If both probabilities are low, space is cold and quiet. If both are high, you get a warm, even boiling vacuum — a kind of temperature of empty space.
In our universe, splitting is slightly higher than merging, and both are high enough to produce a warm vacuum. Space fluctuates and slowly expands. This maps onto what quantum mechanics calls zero-point energy — the fact that you can never reach a state with zero energy. Fluctuations are the floor.
You can also read the split-merge churn as creation and annihilation of virtual particles: a quantum splits (pair creation), the pair merges back (annihilation).
Matter: space that consume itself
We need matter, but we don’t want to introduce anything new. Everything must come from the same quanta with the same two rules.
The key insight: certain formations of quanta can change the local probabilities of splitting and merging.
Most of the fluid splits and merges at baseline rates. But certain self-sustaining patterns can radiate virtual particles whose decay consumes more surrounding space than their creation cost. From the outside, these formations look like sinks — space flows steadily inward toward them.
Matter is a formation of space that, as a net effect, consumes surrounding space. What we call mass corresponds to the rate of consumption. The detailed mechanism becomes clearer when we look at the proton.
Simple formations are very unstable — the surrounding vacuum easily destroys them. Treat them as virtual particles: they form, persist briefly, dissolve. These are the bosons and fermions of the model, capable of moving through space at a speed limited by the rate of splitting and merging — the speed of light.
With extremely low probability, complex formations can arise — higher-order structures built from several simple formations that radiate virtual particles at such a rate that the complex formation becomes completely isolated from the surrounding vacuum. In the thread picture, think of a knot made of several loops.
These complex, self-sustaining, isolated formations are ordinary baryonic matter as we know it.
The proton: a knot in the fabric
Take a closer look at a specific particle — the proton. In standard physics, three quarks, each carrying a different color charge. In Universe 2.0, a quark is a simple formation of space that radiates virtual particles. Quarks don’t exist by themselves; they form composite particles or exist as unstable pairs that quickly decay.
Three quarks form a proton. Their antiparticles form an antiproton.
What makes the proton stable? The quarks radiate virtual particles constantly, creating a barrier that isolates the core from the surrounding vacuum. It’s also possible that quarks occasionally annihilate inside the proton — but the two remaining quarks recreate the lost one, keeping the trio intact. The proton, at a higher level, is a core surrounded by a cloud of radiated virtual particles that fly outward before decaying.
Here’s the crucial part: when these virtual particles decay, they consume a bit of the surrounding space. So from the core there’s an outward flow of virtual particles, but from the outside it looks like an inward flow of space — space is being eaten at the periphery. The proton is a sink.
The way this cloud interacts with other virtual particles defines properties like electric charge.
The antiproton is the mirror image. Its virtual particles, when they decay, produce more space instead of consuming it. The antiproton is a source — space flows outward. Matter and antimatter look symmetric in many respects, but their relationship to the flow of space is opposite.
An optional extension: maybe space isn’t destroyed or created at all. Maybe the proton takes space in on one side and the antiproton pushes it out on the other — together forming something like a jet engine. Space flows through the pair continuously, entering through matter and exiting through antimatter. No net space is lost, just redirected. If this holds, the universe should contain roughly equal amounts of matter and antimatter — and the antimatter has to be somewhere. One candidate: the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM), the diffuse gas between galaxies. This is exactly where you’d expect to find it — antimatter that can’t clump into larger structures and that wasn’t pulled into galaxies by gravity and eventually annihilated.
Movement and the speed of light
The proton’s consumption of space — the inward flow at its periphery — causes it to jitter chaotically, buffeted by the stochastic nature of where and when virtual particles decay. If more space gets consumed in one particular direction, the proton starts moving coherently that way. This is focused movement.
But here’s the constraint: as focused movement increases, chaotic movement decreases. Their sum or relation in general is always the same — always equal to the speed of light.
- At rest: all movement is chaotic. Particles interact at maximum rate. Time flows as fast as it can.
- At the speed of light: all movement is focused. No chaotic motion remains. Interactions cease. Time stops.
This is the origin of time dilation, and it doesn’t require any internal clock. Time in Universe 2.0 is something we perceive only when particles interact — collisions, exchanges of virtual particles, observation of quantum state, any event where one particle affects another. Chaotic movement drives those interactions: more jitter means more bumps, which means faster apparent time.
When a system moves coherently, chaotic movement drops. Fewer random interactions per unit of external time. Processes slow down — time dilates. At the speed of light, interactions stop entirely and time freezes. This is kinematic time dilation as described by special relativity — but here it emerges from interaction rates, not from an abstract clock.
Gravity: the river of space
Two protons near each other. Without any forces, they’d drift apart from expansion.
But each proton consumes space. Each creates an inward current from all directions. The space between them is being consumed from both sides. It shrinks. The protons approach each other — not because a force pushes them, but because the space between them is being eaten.
Gravity is the river of space flowing into matter.
Notice: expansion and gravity are the same process with opposite sign. Expansion creates space — points drift apart. Gravity consumes space — points drift together. One is splitting dominating across the vacuum. The other is matter tipping the local balance toward consumption. Same mechanism, different direction.
A massive object creates an accelerating inflow of space toward it. This leads to a clean distinction between three cases:
A clock on the surface. The surface stops the clock from falling, but the river of space keeps flowing past it. The clock is effectively moving through space — not because it chose to, but because the ground holds it in place while space streams by. That relative motion reduces chaotic movement and slows interactions. The clock ticks slower — gravitational time dilation.
A clock in orbit. The clock is moving through space on its own — tangential velocity keeps it from falling in. That motion through space also reduces chaotic movement. Time dilates, both from the orbital speed and from sitting in the inflow.
A clock in free fall. This is the interesting case. A freely falling clock is not moving through space at all — it’s falling with the space, carried along by the river. There is no relative motion between the clock and the local flow. So no time dilation kicks in during the fall. The clock ticks at full speed all the way down. Time dilation only begins the moment the clock hits the surface and stops — because now the surface holds it still while space continues to rush past.
This matches general relativity’s equivalence principle: free fall is locally indistinguishable from being in empty space. In Universe 2.0, the reason is literal — in free fall, you are at rest relative to your local space.
The complete foundation
The entire model fits in four lines:
- The universe consists of quantized space only.
- With some probability, a quantum of space can split into two.
- With some probability, two quanta of space can merge into one.
- Specific formations of quanta can change these probabilities locally.
Everything else is a consequence.
Does it actually work?
With these rules in hand, let’s check whether Universe 2.0 potentially reproduces what we observe:
1. Accelerating expansion? Yes. More space → more quanta to split → more new space. Exponential growth.
2. Dark energy? Not needed as a separate substance. The net excess of splitting over merging is dark energy.
3. Peculiar velocities of galaxies? Yes. Recession comes from expansion. Peculiar velocity comes from focused movement of matter through space.
4. Gravity? Yes. Matter consumes space, creating an inward flow that accelerates near the surface — inverse-square-like attraction.
5. Kinematic time dilation? Yes. Chaotic plus focused movement is constant. More focused movement means fewer interactions — slower time.
6. Quantum vacuum fluctuations? Yes. Split-merge churn creates a fluctuating vacuum with bounded-below energy — zero-point energy.
7. Gravitational time dilation? Yes. Inflow of space near a massive object means objects on its surface are effectively moving through space, reducing interactions.
8. Galaxy rotation without dark matter? Potentially. If the space-fluid supports large-scale persistent flows, stars at galactic edges get carried along — flat rotation curves without hidden mass.
9. Gravitational lensing? Yes. Light travels through the space-fluid at the speed of light relative to local flow. Inflow bends the path — same result as general relativity.
10. Black holes? Yes. If a formation consumes space faster than the vacuum can supply it, inflow exceeds the speed of light at some radius — an event horizon. A sonic horizon in the fluid analogy.
11. Photons? Yes. Self-sustaining disturbances in the split-merge dynamics — waves or solitons propagating through the medium at the speed of light. Not particles in space; patterns of space.
Context: what Universe 2.0 tries to unify
Physics currently runs on two frameworks that don’t talk to each other well. The Standard Model handles three of the four fundamental forces (electromagnetic, weak, strong) and classifies all known elementary particles — but it doesn’t include gravity. General relativity handles gravity beautifully as the geometry of spacetime — but it isn’t quantized, and attempts to quantize it tend to break down.
Time dilation, the speed-of-light limit, wave-particle duality, virtual particles, quantum vacuum fluctuations — all of these are well-established phenomena. The vacuum itself is filled with quantum fields whose fluctuations create matter and mediate forces. What’s missing is a unified picture: one framework that produces all of it.
Universe 2.0 proposes a different starting point: gravity is not a force at all. It is the flow of space. And space is the only thing there is.
Citations
Baraban (2026). Universe 2.0 Concept.https://KintaroAI.com/blog/2026/02/06/universe-2.0-concept/ (KintaroAI)@misc{baraban2026universe20concept,
author = {Baraban},
title = {Universe 2.0 Concept},
year = {2026},
url = {https://KintaroAI.com/blog/2026/02/06/universe-2.0-concept/},
}