The Phase Architecture of Spacetime: An Energy–Information Identity Model of Cosmological Cycles and Spatial In-Collapse

Abstract

This paper proposes that spacetime is not fundamental but a phase state of an underlying Energy–Information field, offering a parsimony-first alternative that accounts for the cosmological cycle, quantum measurement, the arrow of time, and the Higgs sector's near-criticality without quantized gravity, string theory, extra dimensions, a multiverse, or fine-tuning. It makes falsifiable predictions, including a specific sub-TeV scalar spectrum and an exact, non-evolving dark-energy equation of state. Spacetime is not treated here as a fundamental background but as a phase state of a primordial Energy–Information (E/I) field. The field's native condition is conformal: it possesses causal structure (light cones, angles, ratios) but no scale — no rulers, no clocks, no rest mass. A metric spacetime, governed by General Relativity, is what appears when a scale is frozen into that conformal structure. Mass is frozen scale; the massless sector never freezes and remains conformal in every epoch. The freezing is driven not by an inserted parameter but by a marginal, self-starting imperfection — the trace anomaly — that generates scale radiatively (dimensional transmutation), in a cascade of events (strong and electroweak) rather than a single Higgs moment. The reverse transition — mass evaporating back into radiation through stars and black holes — releases the scale and returns the universe to the conformal phase, yielding a cyclic, singularity-free cosmology in the spirit of Penrose's Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, but with an explicit mechanism for the crossover. Quantum measurement is recast as the projection of the substrate onto the nearest state a scale-locked detector can represent, with objective-collapse statistics driven by the substrate's own fluctuation and total energy-information conserved. From these principles the framework derives, rather than posits, several objects usually taken as given: the localization kernel as the mean-field order parameter of the scale-locking transition; the covariant current that carries energy across the substrate–metric boundary; the origin of time as an internal (York) clock read from the diluting density; and — because gravity is induced — black-hole entropy as the entanglement of severed substrate correlations, equal to the Bekenstein–Hawking value A/4. Its sharpest falsifiable prediction is a specific sub-TeV scalar spectrum — a pseudo-dilaton locked by a Gildener–Weinberg mass relation to a companion scalar above ≈ 320 GeV (≈ 540 GeV if the 125 GeV boson is the pseudo-dilaton) — together with a faint, experimentally bounded collapse signal present in massive matter but absent in radiation. The cosmology is completed without an inflaton — the smooth early universe is inherited from the prior cycle rather than tuned — and dark energy enters as the imprint of the un-scale-frozen substrate, predicted to be an exact, non-evolving cosmological constant (w = −1). Several problems are inherited rather than solved, and stated as such: a first-principles derivation of the Born measure, a fully radiative origin of every scale including gravity, the primordial perturbation spectrum without inflation, and the magnitude of the cosmological constant. The paper is offered as an interpretation valued for parsimony — accounting for these features without quantized gravity, extra dimensions, a spatial multiverse, or fine-tuning — not as a unique claim on the truth.