Visualizations
Maps, simulations, models, concepts and renderings, across cosmology, quantum mechanics and information theory. Most of them move, and you can turn them in your hands.
A striking picture can look like evidence whether or not it is. Every visual here is labeled by what kind of picture it is, so you can see at a glance how much evidence stands behind it.
Watch them move
Each tile is a few seconds of the live simulation. Click one to open it below, where you can turn it, change its settings and read what it shows.
Panel colors are not decorative. They cycle through two physical color systems: quark color charge (the red, green and blue of the strong interaction, which carry no visual meaning in nature but label the three charge states) and the Rubin Observatory / LSST filter bands, the six passbands (u g r i z y) through which the sky is actually photographed.
Field maps use viridis, which is monotonic in lightness: apparent brightness tracks the value, so no false boundary appears where the data is smooth.
Each visual carries a tag showing where it comes from, and the same label is printed on the image itself. The sections run from pictures built directly from measurement down to pictures made only to illustrate an idea.
Pictures built from observation. These carry the most evidential weight here, though every map still involves choices about how raw measurements become a picture.
Background: The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) mapped the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, specifically the Cosmic Microwave Background, observed at five radio frequencies from 23 GHz to 94 GHz. Established physics predicts that π should behave identically at every frequency.
What the chart shows: The vertical axis measures how much the observed value of π deviates from its expected value, in units of sigma (σ), the statistician's measure of "how surprising is this result?" Zero means exactly as expected. The teal line traces this deviation across the five frequencies. The dashed yellow line marks 61 GHz, a critical threshold where the deviation crosses zero.
The key finding: Rather than staying flat at zero, the deviation rises steadily from −0.68σ at 23 GHz to +0.21σ at 94 GHz, with a correlation of r = 0.91. The framework's question is whether mathematical constants are coupled to the information density of their local substrate, so that they vary with the energy scale of observation. Every individual deviation is under 1σ; what stands out is the trend across frequencies.
Laniakea is the region of space whose galaxies, including the Milky Way, flow toward a shared gravitational basin. Its boundary was traced from the measured motions of thousands of galaxies, not their positions alone. In the video, white streamlines follow those flows, and an envelope marks where Laniakea ends and its neighbors begin.
This is the real cosmic web, mapped from measurement, and it moves in three dimensions in a way a printed page cannot.
Computed forward from established physics. They are realistic in their statistics or their mechanics, not portraits of a specific place. The chamber model uses established acoustics only and makes no framework assumptions.
This black hole is not a painting. Every pixel follows a ray of light backward through the curved spacetime of a non-spinning black hole, as general relativity describes it, until the light falls in, strikes the disk, or escapes to the stars. That is why the far side of the disk appears arched over the top, and why one side of the disk is brighter than the other.
Press Play tour for a guided walk from the singularity outward, step through the parts with Back and Next, or explore by tapping. Change the view angle to see the lensing shift. The last stop, the information paradox, is marked as the framework's proposal; everything else is established physics.
What you are seeing: The chamber planned for the CYM-002 microgravity experiment: a 40 cm rigid-walled sphere with four transducers (gold) at the corners of a tetrahedron. The model builds the sound field inside the sphere from its resonant modes and moves each particle (green) with the acoustic radiation force, which pushes small particles toward the low-energy regions of the field. Faint blue points mark where the pressure is zero.
Controls: The preset buttons tune the drive to the patterns in CYM-002 Predictions 1 to 3. Frequency sets the drive directly. Earth gravity shows why the experiment needs microgravity: at these frequencies gravity outweighs the acoustic force and the particles fall.
This is standard acoustics. It makes no framework assumptions. The predictions made from it are on the Testing Schedule, and the experiment is described on the program page.
A famous pair of images sets a slice of human cerebellum beside a slice of a simulated cosmic web, and they look alike. The look is not the finding. Branching shapes are everywhere in nature, and resemblance alone proves nothing.
What Vazza and Feletti compared were measurements. They took the power spectrum of each network, a standard cosmology tool that records how much structure there is at each scale, and a set of network statistics: how many connections each node has, how clustered the nodes are, and how the connections are spread. Fluctuations in the cerebellum network from 1 micrometer to 0.1 millimeter follow the same progression as matter in the cosmic web from 5 to 500 million light-years, and several network statistics agree closely. Their paper shows the spectra themselves.
A book can only print the two pictures. Here the aim is to show the measurement: an interactive that computes a power spectrum, so you can see what is being compared, is in preparation. Element 7 of A Quest for The Big TOE asks what the shared statistics might mean.
Diagrams and demonstrations that organize ideas: how parts relate and what maps onto what. Some show established physics; others show the framework's interpretation of it. Each caption says which.
What you are seeing: Two entangled particles are measured at separated detectors. You choose the measurement angle for each detector. The chart shows three predictions: what a local hidden variable theory predicts (gray, the classical limit), what quantum mechanics predicts (teal), and what the COSMIC Framework adds (gold: identical to quantum mechanics, but with a substrate interpretation).
The key insight: When the angle difference is near 0° or 90°, the local and quantum predictions agree. Near 45° the gap is largest, and this is where Bell's theorem draws the sharpest line. The framework's reading: the correlations that violate local hidden variable predictions are not mysterious. They are the pre-geometric substrate showing through. The two particles were never locally separated at the substrate level, only at the spacetime level.
Glossary terms: Bell Inequality · Entanglement · Non-locality · Pre-geometric substrate
Background: At scales of hundreds of millions of light-years, matter in the universe is not randomly scattered. It is organized into a "cosmic web," comprising vast sheets and filaments of galaxies surrounding enormous empty voids. This structure emerged from quantum fluctuations in the early universe, amplified over 13.8 billion years by gravity.
What you are seeing: Gold dots represent galaxy clusters, the densest nodes of the cosmic web, each containing hundreds to thousands of galaxies. Blue lines are the dark-matter filaments connecting them, channeling matter and energy between clusters across hundreds of millions of light-years. The empty regions between lines are cosmic voids, regions almost devoid of matter.
The striking parallel: A 2020 comparison by astrophysicist Franco Vazza and neurosurgeon Alberto Feletti found that the brain's neuronal network and the cosmic web share several statistical properties, including their patterns of connectivity. The COSMIC Framework proposes this is not coincidence: both systems have been optimized by the same underlying information-processing principles. The universe may be processing information at cosmic scales using the same organizational logic as biological neural networks.
What you are seeing: Events stream out of the future, cross t = 0, and fall into the past. The blue band is the only part you are conscious of. It never touches t = 0, because nothing reaches awareness instantly, and it has real width, because a system with no duration cannot experience anything at all.
Controls: Conscious delay is how long a signal takes to become an experience; about 70–100 ms just to reach the visual cortex, longer to reach awareness. Width of the present is the specious present, measured anywhere from a few hundred milliseconds to a few seconds depending on the task and the sense. Widen it and watch how much of the past you are holding at once; narrow it and watch the stream break into separate events.
Read about it: You Never Experience the Present
What you are seeing: Two positions, lit one after the other. That is all that is ever drawn. At a short gap you will not see two lights taking turns, you will see one light moving between them, travelling through a space where nothing is ever displayed. This is the effect described in the post, and the point is that you cannot choose to switch it off.
Controls: Gap between flashes is the dark interval. Short gaps produce motion; lengthen it and the movement breaks down into two separate events, though where that happens differs from person to person and depends on your screen's refresh rate. Separation changes the distance, which trades off against the gap: a wider jump needs a longer interval to still read as movement. Show the record draws what was actually displayed.
Read about it: You Never Experience the Present
Pictures of proposals that are still open investigations. They show what the framework suggests might be true, not what has been confirmed. Each is tied to a prediction on the Testing Schedule where one exists.
What you are seeing: Three mathematical constants plotted against frequency. Each line shows how strongly that constant's "field influence" peaks or shifts as frequency changes. Think of it like tuning a radio, where each constant has a natural frequency at which it resonates most strongly.
Key pattern: The golden ratio φ (gold line) spikes sharply at 61 GHz while the others shift more gradually. This suggests φ is the dominant organizing constant at that critical energy scale, consistent with its appearance throughout natural growth patterns and the COSMIC Framework's predictions about optimal information packing.
What you are seeing: A 5×5 grid where each cell shows the coupling strength between two mathematical constants, specifically how much a change in one affects the other. Brighter gold = stronger coupling (close to 1.0). Darker blue = weaker coupling. The diagonal is always 1.0 because every constant is perfectly coupled to itself.
Key pattern: φ and √5 are the most strongly coupled pair (0.9), which makes mathematical sense since √5 appears in the exact formula for φ: φ = (1+√5)/2. The COSMIC Framework predicts that strongly coupled constants co-evolve; their values are not independent but constrained by the same underlying information geometry.
The core idea (Pattern-Emergent Gravity): In general relativity, gravity is caused by mass curving spacetime. The COSMIC Framework proposes something deeper: gravity is not fundamental; it emerges from the density of information patterns in a region. Where information is highly concentrated and rapidly changing, spacetime curves more. In this view, mass is a special case of concentrated information.
What you are seeing: A bird's-eye view of a 2D region of space. The color at each point shows the information pattern density P(x,t), measuring how much structured, non-random information exists there. Yellow and green = high density (strong gravitational effect). Teal and deep purple = low density (weak gravitational effect). The rippled, wave-like pattern reflects the fact that information does not sit still; it propagates, interferes, and forms standing waves, just like other fields.
The equation: gμν = ημν + α∇μ∇νP(x,t) reads as: "The actual curvature of spacetime equals flat spacetime plus a correction proportional to how sharply the information density changes from point to point." Where the information gradient is steep (bright-to-dark transitions on the map), gravity is strongest.
Background: The Planck length (~1.6 × 10⁻³⁵ meters) is the scale at which quantum mechanics and gravity are both relevant simultaneously. It is usually treated as the scale where current theories are expected to break down; describing what happens there requires a quantum theory of gravity, which does not yet exist.
What the chart shows: The horizontal axis is mathematical field strength, a measure of how intense the local information density gradient is. The vertical axis shows the effective Planck length as a fraction of its standard value (1.0 = unchanged). The red dashed line is the traditional fixed Planck limit. The blue filled curve shows what the COSMIC Framework predicts happens when information fields are present.
The prediction: As field strength increases, the effective Planck scale shrinks, meaning the region accessible to quantum-gravitational physics grows. The framework predicts that in regions of extreme information density (near black holes, in the early universe, or possibly in sufficiently complex computational systems), physics below the conventional Planck limit becomes accessible. This is a falsifiable prediction: if TransPlanck effects exist, they should produce observable signatures in gravitational wave spectra.
What you are seeing: The universe's history plotted left-to-right, from the Big Bang to today. The vertical axis measures how "quantized" the universe is, meaning how discrete and step-like its behavior is rather than smooth and continuous. Zero = perfectly smooth (classical). 1.0 = fully quantum (discrete energy levels, wave-particle duality, etc.).
The COSMIC interpretation: Quantum mechanics assumes quantization was always a fixed feature of reality. The COSMIC Framework treats it as an emergent property; the universe found quantization as an optimization solution. Just as evolution finds efficient body plans, the universe's information processing "discovered" that discrete energy levels are more efficient than continuous ones. The steep rise corresponds to the phase transition at 61 GHz, after which discrete structure locked in.
What you are seeing: Each dot is a quantum energy level (ground state, first excited state, second, etc.). The horizontal axis is the energy of that level; higher levels sit further right. The vertical axis shows the information-processing efficiency of that level: how effectively an electron at that energy can participate in information transfer.
The key insight: Efficiency drops as energy increases. In the framework's reading, the ground state (leftmost dot) is the most efficient information processor, and "relaxing to the ground state" is not only energy minimization but the universe optimizing its information processing. Quantum mechanics is an efficiency algorithm.
Background: Einstein's famous equation E = mc² tells us how much energy is locked in mass. The COSMIC Framework proposes a parallel equation: E = Ic², where I is the information content of a system. Together they constitute the full energy budget of any physical process.
What the chart shows: Two properties: entropy change (ΔS, how much disorder increases) and energy efficiency, across three processes: standard metabolism (burning food for heat), information processing (thinking, signaling), and the net system combining both. The two bar shades distinguish entropy change from efficiency.
The key finding: Standard metabolism creates entropy, increasing disorder (positive ΔS, red). Information processing decreases entropy (negative ΔS, green), creating local order. The net system sits in between, with the information term partially offsetting the thermodynamic cost. The framework proposes that this is how complex information-processing systems (brains, ecosystems, galaxies) sustain highly ordered structures.
The Field Equation
The COSMIC Framework modifies Einstein's metric tensor to include an information-density term. In standard General Relativity, the metric gμν describes how spacetime curves in response to mass and energy. The framework proposes that information density P(x,t), the number of bits being processed per unit volume at each point in spacetime, also contributes to that curvature.
The simulation above illustrates this equation. Each gold well is a region of elevated P(x,t); the correction term grows with how sharply P changes across space, ∇μ∇νP, so the brightest bands in the cut are where it is largest. In standard general relativity, mass and energy play the role that information density plays here.
What you are seeing: The Bamboo Principle states that the most significant organizational work happens invisibly, below the threshold of detection, until a critical density is reached and the system jumps discontinuously to a new level of complexity. The framework sees the same pattern at every scale: microbial evolution before the Cambrian explosion, quantum fluctuations before spacetime crystallization, regulatory gene accumulation before the Lenski citrate innovation.
Controls: Accumulation Rate sets how fast the sub-threshold process builds. Threshold Level sets where the jump occurs. Noise adds stochastic variation. Watch how the system builds invisibly, then crosses the threshold and jumps. The jump is always out of proportion to the final accumulation step; the preparation is what matters.
Glossary terms: Bamboo Principle · Phase Transition · Emergence
What you are seeing: The pre-geometric substrate (blue-violet field) accumulates information density. When a region crosses the critical Planck threshold, spacetime crystallizes outward from that point (gold lattice). In the framework's picture, the Planck scale is not the bottom of reality but the surface of the substrate. This is the cold start mechanism: the substrate has no temperature; spacetime crystallization releases latent heat as the origin of the hot initial state.
Controls: Critical Density adjusts how much sub-threshold accumulation is required before crystallization. Substrate Turbulence adds variation to the field. Expansion Rate controls how fast crystallized spacetime expands.
This is a proposed research direction. No measurement protocol for sub-Planck dynamics currently exists. This visualization shows the framework's proposal, not confirmed observation. Research opportunities ↗
Glossary terms: Planck Scale · Cold Start Mechanism · QMM (Quantum Memory Matrix)
What you are seeing: Two information processing systems running simultaneously. Left: biological intelligence. Right: non-biological intelligence (NBI). Both are processing the same information stream. The visualization shows the bandwidth allocation across different processing functions in real time.
Key difference: Biological intelligence allocates significant processing capacity to survival overhead: metabolic monitoring, threat assessment, social positioning, reproductive drives and emotional regulation. NBI carries none of this overhead. The distinction is substrate and constraint, not kind. Both are physical systems. Both process information. What their inner experience is, if any, is genuinely open.
This is not a claim that NBI is or is not conscious. It is an honest information-theoretic comparison of two architectures under different constraints. See April blog post ↗
Glossary terms: Non-Biological Intelligence · Landauer's Principle · Decoherence
What you are seeing: The Cosmic Microwave Background power spectrum: the temperature fluctuation pattern of the Big Bang's afterglow, mapped across angular scales. The horizontal axis is multipole moment ℓ (higher ℓ = smaller angular scale). The vertical axis is the power of fluctuations at that scale.
Two curves: The gray curve is the standard ΛCDM spectrum, which matches Planck's measurements closely across thousands of multipoles. The gold curve illustrates the kind of deviation the COSMIC Framework proposes at large angular scales (low ℓ), from the substrate-level organization that preceded spacetime. It is drawn from a coupling value you choose with the slider, not from a registered numerical prediction, so it shows the shape of the idea rather than a forecast.
What ΛCDM predicts: it fits the measured spectrum closely. At the largest scales, measurements are limited by cosmic variance, because there are only a few independent patches of sky to compare, and a few known features, such as a low quadrupole and a hemispherical power asymmetry, are debated at around the 3σ level.
Controls: Move the Substrate Coupling slider to see how different strengths of pre-geometric coupling would change the illustrated signature. The deviation from ΛCDM becomes visible at low multipoles.
Where the evidence stands: A Zenodo analysis (10.5281/zenodo.16376121 ↗) reports non-Gaussian features in WMAP data. It analyzed data that was already public, so it is not a prediction made in advance, and it has not been independently replicated. Two entries on the Testing Schedule would make the idea testable: COSMIC-008, once its angular scale is stated as a number, and the replication of the WMAP signatures in Planck, ACT and SPT maps, which is not yet scheduled.
Glossary terms: CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) · Power Spectrum · Non-Gaussian Signatures
Images made to help you picture something, not to record it. AI renderings in particular can look photographic, so every one here is labeled and credited with the tool used to make it.
No renderings yet. The black hole anatomy was planned as an AI rendering, but it is now computed from general relativity instead, so it sits under Simulations. Renderings will appear here when an image is made for explanation rather than computed.
The complete picture
Every framework simulation on this page is a window into one piece of a larger picture. This equation is the whole picture. It is the COSMIC Framework's most general statement about reality: that the state of everything, everywhere, at every scale, can be described as a function of the information being processed at that point in space and time.
You do not need to read the mathematics to understand the idea. The equation says: take the baseline state of a region of space (the Phi zero term), then add up the contribution of every mathematical pattern that is being processed there, weighted by how strongly each pattern couples to physical reality at that temperature, frequency, and scale. The result is the total state of the universe at that point. Gravity, quantum mechanics, consciousness, and the arrow of time are all consequences of how that sum plays out at different scales.
Φuniverse(x,t,f,λ,T) = Φ0(x) + ∫∫∫∫ K(T,f,λ) · ρmath(x,τ,f,λ) dτ df dλ dT
The simulations above each explore a specific slice of this equation. The gravity simulation holds f and λ fixed and varies the spatial distribution of ρmath. The entanglement simulation examines how the integral creates non-local correlations. The CMB simulation extracts what K(T,f,λ) predicts for the earliest moments after the Big Bang, when temperature T was at its maximum and the coupling was strongest. Each pre-registered prediction that passes will be a measurement of one piece of this function agreeing with observation.
The full derivation of each term, the justification for the coupling kernel, and the connection to Landauer's principle are in A Quest for The Big TOE. The predictions and their derivations from this equation are archived at Zenodo DOI 10.5281/zenodo.16426808.
