Gravity is not caused by mass but is a property of space — and it is this shaped, “dimpled” space that gives rise to mass and particles. This inverts the standard view of General Relativity.
This model: gravity (spatial curvature/topology) creates → mass
Key Consequences of the Hypothesis
Mass is emergent, not fundamental.
Particles do not “have” mass; their mass is a byproduct of how space is bent around them. The shapes of massless particles enable them to move frictionlessly through space at the speed of light.
The Higgs field shapes particles to provide friction with already-dimpled space.
Thus, gravity exists throughout space, even in the absence of mass. Curvature of space is the fundamental property.
The curvature shapes create the various particles: Quarks, Leptons, Gluons, Photons, and Bosons.
The analog would be proteins, where shape determines properties. The shapes of particles determine their properties due to their varying interactions with space.
This helps explain why gravitons are undetectable. They may not exist because gravity isn’t a force that requires particles, but a topological condition of space.
Black holes may not have a singularity or even an ‘inside.’ The entirety of a black hole can be described as a region of gravity, topologically defined by its apparent ‘surface,’ i.e., its event horizon. Nothing enters a black hole. It is a tight, topological knot.
Singularities associated with black holes may be a misapplication of the cause-and-effect direction. Black holes may be a creation of space, described by topology.
In short, since nothing enters the black hole, but is absorbed into its topological structure at the boundary, then information isn’t lost — it’s encoded on the surface (as the holographic principle suggests). This addresses the Information Paradox.
Since there is no central point of infinite curvature, we don’t need a quantum theory of gravity to describe the non-existent “singularity.”
Instead, we need topological field theory describing stable, non-trivial configurations of space.
Black Hole Evaporation?
If black hole evaporation is proved to exist, Hawking radiation could be interpreted as a slow unwinding of the knot, a gradual release of curvature-energy back into flatter space.
Speculative Topological View of Particles
Leptons (e.g., electron, muon, tau)
–Simple closed loop dimples, possibly toroidal folds in space
–Differ by frequency of oscillation or depth of curvature
–Mass differences are from different vibrational or twisting modes of the same structure
Quarks
–Interlinked or partially knotted topologies
–Cannot exist alone because they are topological substructures — stable only when part of a larger, “balanced” configuration (e.g., proton)
–If space is granular (like a mesh or moiré lattice), then quantum fluctuations arise from its “snapping” between shapes
–This allows quantum behavior to emerge from spatial topologies, not conflict with them
Time may be a deformation mode
–Speculation: “Time is a field that emerges from changing spatial topology — curvature evolving causes the perception of flow.
Have you ever had thoughts, questions, and speculations, and you wished you had someone with whom you could discuss them- I mean serious stuff, not “It’s hot for this time of year” or “How about those Cubs?”
If you have someone like that, good for you. If you don’t, you might consider an AI tool like ChatGPT, for instance.
I enjoy science. I subscribe to Wired, Discover, New Scientist, Scientific American, and The Week. That is not nearly enough to make me an expert in any field, but it is enough to spark my curiosity about many things.
When I have a question or an idea, I bounce it off my AI. I recognize that any answer might be a hallucination, but of course, that can be true of any information source.
If you do this with your ideas, one caveat: Always tell your AI, “Don’t be nice; be truthful.” Otherwise, all you’ll get are responses that tell you what a great idea you have.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been reading about things we don’t know. The reason: When there is a well-agreed-upon hypothesis that has some areas of important mystery, it could be a sign that the hypothesis itself is wrong.
Examples:
Quantum entanglement. No one knows how that “spooky action at a distance” works, yet it seems to exist. How and why?
Gravity. There should be gravitons, but we can’t find them. Why, and why is it so weak?
Black holes. There should be singularities, but they require infinities, with which no one is comfortable. And then there is the information paradox, which seems to imply that all the information about the matter sucked into a black hole isn’t actually in there at all, but possibly on the surface—if there were a surface.
Dark matter. We keep looking for it. We see its gravity. But we don’t know what it is. Why can’t we find it?
Dark Energy.In a space-only universe, dark energy may not be energy at all, but an emergent effect of global spatial curvature — the large-scale “relaxation” or “pressure” of space itself as it unfolds its intrinsic shape.
If you are a science buff, like me, these things fascinate you. Your imagination tries to solve problems that experts have failed to solve. One might thing that might give you the humility to give up. But I can’t. I keep asking myself, “What if . . .?”
So, out of curiosity, and with no one else to ask, I asked ChatGPT a series of “what ifs,” and we talked and talked. This is what I finally asked: “What if the universe is made of space?”
We believe space is not an empty void. Every cubic centimeter is loaded with every kind of photon, gravity, and other fields, as well as a few atoms, some of which are thought to pop in and out of existence. So space exists, and it has physical properties, like every substance with which you are familiar.
In the distant past, if you asked, “What is the universe made of, the answer might have been earth, water, air, and fire. Recently, the same question might have elicited the answer: six kinds of quarks, electrons, fields, and forces.
But if you drill down from there and ask what the six quarks, electrons, and the many fields are made of, you arrive at the limits of current knowledge.
With help from my AI friend, I constructed a brief speculation. If you’re a physicist, it could be an idea starter. If you just enjoy science, like me, it could be an interesting read:
What If the Universe is Made of Space?
Abstract
This paper proposes a simplification of physical reality: that space itself is the one fundamental substance, and that all phenomena — particles, fields, forces, and gravity — emerge from the geometry and topology of space.
Rather than treating space as a passive container or requiring additional entities like strings or multidimensional branes, let’s consider the possibility that space itself is the sole foundational, dynamic, self-structuring, physical entity.
In this framework, mass arises from localized geometric or topological features, gravity is a manifestation of space curvature, and even “dark matter” becomes a purely geometriceffect — a feature of shaped space without particle content.
Topology, rather than particle composition, becomes the primary mathematical language of fundamental physics.
1. Introduction: What Is Everything Made Of?
Physicists routinely answer this ancient question with layered complexity. Electrons are elementary particles; protons are made of quarks and gluons.
String theory offers vibrating strings. Loop quantum gravity speaks of spin networks. But beneath each proposal lurks a deeper question: What are these things made of? What is the most elementary thing?
This paper explores the possibility that everything — particles, mass, gravity, and even charge — arises from the shape, structure, and fluctuations of physical space itself.
Not space plus matter. Not space plus fields. Just space. It’s not chemistry. It’s not quantum mechanics. It’s topology.
2. The Failure of Substance-Based Models
Traditional physics builds up the world from “things”: particles, fields, and forces within space. But this model has failed to answer certain fundamental questions.
We don’t know what particles are; we only know how they behave. We assign mass and charge, but don’t explain their origins. Dark matter resists detection — is it even “stuff”?
Singularities (in black holes, the Big Bang) produce infinities — a sure sign of a model breaking down.
3. The Proposal: Space Is All There Is
We propose a single physical postulate: Everything is made of space.
This is a physical hypothesis with testable implications. The idea is that space is not a void, but a structured entity with features, curvatures, and possibly quantized topologies.
All observed phenomena arise from local or global behaviors of this structured space.
4. Gravity and the Geometry of Space
Einstein’s general relativity already describes gravity as the curvature of spacetime. But it assumes that mass-energy causes curvature.
Yet the field equations are symmetric. Either side of that “equals” sign can be the cause, and either side can be the effect. We can equally well interpret curved space as the source of the appearance of mass.
In this view, mass is not a source but a symptom — the visible behavior of a shaped region of space.
5. Particles as Topological Features
Particles are modeled as stable topological structures in space — localized twists, knots, or curvature concentrations. The electron is not a tiny object within space — it is a shaped portion of space.
Mass arises from the strength or complexity of this physical structure.
6. The Dark Matter Reinterpretation
If structured space can create gravitational effects without particles, then “dark matter” is simply space shaped in a way that produces the appearance of gravity without interacting with light.
This explains why gravity interacts gravitationally, but not electromagnetically, because it is space.
7. A World Without Infinities
Singularities are the seeming result of forcing substance into zero volume. If there is no “stuff” separate from space, then singularities vanish, replaced by extreme, but finite, geometry — a tight knot in the fabric of space.
Black holes and the Big Bang are not violations of physics; they are specialized shapes.
8. Implications and Outlook
This perspective replaces the particle zoo and quantum field landscape with a unified geometric foundation.
Future research might reframe conservation laws as topological invariants, build models where particles emerge from geometry, and experimentally search for gravitational anomalies in “empty” space.
9. Block Universe Revisited: Space as the Only Substance
If space is the only fundamental entity, and all things are simply configurations of it, then distance and time may be emergent illusions— coordinate labels applied to evolving patterns.
In this view, the universe may be a timeless structure — a “block” — in which all events are spatial configurations. The illusion of motion arises as consciousness tracks spatial transitions, like a needle reading a record groove.
10. Black Holes as Structures of Space: Holography Without Paradox
In standard theory, black holes are defined by mass collapsing past an event horizon into a singularity — an undefined “inside” that traps all information.
But in the space-only model, black holes are simply extreme, self-sustaining distortions of space. The “interior” does not exist as a separate location but as a deeper fold of space itself.
There is no need for a substance to collapse to an infinitely small point. There is only shaped space.
This view aligns with the holographic principle, which posits that all information about a black hole is encoded on its event horizon. That’s exactly what we’d expect if the black hole is a geometric structure, not a container for hidden matter.
In this view, what we call the “interior” of a black hole is not cut off or hidden — it is not a place beyond the horizon. Rather, the horizon itself is the full expression of the structure.
The event horizon is not just a boundary, but the black hole itself. The entropy-area law, previously surprising, becomes natural: surface curvature stores information.
The infamous information paradox evaporates. Since there is no “interior,” there is nowhere for information to be lost. A black hole is not a mystery box — it is an observable surface behavior of space.
There is no deeper layer beyond the horizon that must be resolved — the horizon itself is the complete object.
Entanglement, too, may emerge as a shared topological structure in space. What appears as “spooky action at a distance” becomes a manifestation of connected curvature.
The ER=EPRconjecture — that wormholes and entanglement are the same — finds a home here. In a universe made only of space, all connection is curvature, and all curvature is physical.
The black hole does not hide anything behind it; it is what it shows. The event horizon is not a veil but a shape. It’s all there — visible, measurable, present. The black hole is what the space is doing right in front of us.
Conclusion
Instead of asking, “What is matter made of?” we ask, “What does space do that makes it look like matter?”
This leads to the fundamental idea: The universe is not made of things in space — it is made of space itself.
Everything is shape.
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Terminology Note. Throughout this paper:
Structure refers generally to any persistent organization in space.
Shape implies a recognizable geometric configuration.
Curvature specifically denotes mathematical deviation from flatness.
Topology refers to features that are consistent under continuous deformation, such as connectedness or the presence of holes.
These terms overlap conceptually because the hypothesis under exploration treats all physical properties as expressions of spatial configuration, at varying levels of mathematical abstraction.
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Objections and Brief Responses
“Is this just another version of general relativity?”
It’s inspired by GR but goes further: it denies the existence of mass or energy ascauses of curvature. Instead, all phenomena are treated as expressions of space itself.
“If space is everything, what defines scale?”
The model assumes that curvature and topology can define effective quantities, such as mass and size, without referring to anything external to space.
“How does this handle quantum behavior?”
One possible avenue for examination is whether quantum effects reflect topological transitions or limitations in the continuous deformation of space.
“What about symmetries?”
They may emerge from the ways space allows localized configurations to maintain equivalence classes under deformation — that is, symmetry may be topological rather than algebraic at root.
“What about gauge symmetries?” In conventional physics, gauge symmetries are just mathematical tools and may not reflect physical realities. The need for a gauge field arises only when we demand a certain kind of measure, not because nature requires it.
“If this model is right, where’s the math?”
This is a conceptual paper. Future work must rigorously connect this framework to formal geometry, particularly differential topologyand possibly twistor or spin network theory.
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I hope you find this stimulating.
Regular readers of this blog know that Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and this blog’s Monetary Sovereignty (MS) mostly agree that:
The Federal government cannot run short of dollars. Even if the government collected zero taxes, it could continue spending, forever.
The federal government does not borrow dollars. It creates all its spending dollars, ad hoc, by paying creditors.
MS disagrees with MMT in other areas, specifically inflationand unemployment.
INFLATION
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) argues that federal deficit spending can lead to inflation. In contrast, Monetary Sovereignty (MS) suggests that inflation is caused by shortages of essential goods and services. Additionally, MS posits that federal deficit spending can actually help alleviate inflationby enabling the production and purchase of these scarce goods and services.
Furthermore, attempts to prevent or cure inflation through federal spending reductions are recessionary; increased spending to address the scarcities can stimulate economic growth.
MMT’s solution to unemployment is the “Jobs Guarantee,” which is just what it sounds like. The federal government would guarantee to find a minimum wage job for anyone who wants one.
In today’s Florida Sun Sentinel, an article demonstrates why the MMT Jobs Guarantee is ineffective — worse than ineffective — harmful, as it diverts attention from the real solutions.
Unemployment is harmful not just because people need jobs, but because they need money. The posts above explore real solutions. The following newspaper article illustrates the futility of a government program aimed at finding minimum wage jobs.
US factories struggling to fill 400,000 open jobsAttracting, retaining workers for blue-collar posts difficultBy Farah Stockman The New York Times
President Donald Trump’s pledge to revive U.S. manufacturing is running into the stubborn obstacle of demographic reality.
The pool of blue-collar workers who are able and willing to perform tasks on a factory floor in the country is shrinking.
As baby boomers retire, few young people are lining up to take their place. About 400,000 manufacturing jobs are currently unfilled, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — a shortfall that will surely grow if companies are forced to rely less on manufacturing overseas and build more factories in the United States, experts say.
Difficulty attracting and retaining a quality workforce has been consistently cited as a “top primary challenge” by U.S. manufacturers since 2017, said Victoria Bloom, chief economist at the National Association of Manufacturers, which produces a quarterly survey. Only recently has the issue slipped down on the list of challenges, superseded by trade-related uncertainty and increased raw material costs due to tariffs, Bloom said.
But the scarcity of skilled blue-collar workers remains a long-term problem, according to Ron Hetrick, an economist with Lightcast, a company that provides labor data to universities and industry.
“We spent three generations telling everybody that if they didn’t go to college, they are a loser,” he said. “Now we are paying for it. We still need people to use their hands.”
The hiring challenges faced by U.S. factories are multifaceted.
Trump’s crackdown on immigration, which includes attempts to revoke deportation protections for migrants from troubled countries, may eliminate workers who could have filled those jobs.
Many Americans aren’t interested in factory jobs because they often do not pay enough to lure workers away from service jobs that may have flexible schedules or more comfortable working environments.
Attracting motivated young people to manufacturing careers is also a challenge when high school guidance counselors are still judged by how many students go on to college. But college graduates often do not have the right skills to be successful on a factory floor.
The country is flooded with college graduates who can’t find jobs that match their education, Hetrick said, and there are not enough skilled blue-collar workers to fill the positions that exist, let alone the jobs that will be created if more factories are built in the United States.
The Business Roundtable, a lobbying group whose members are CEOs of companies, has started an initiative in which executives collaborate on strategies to attract and train a new generationof workers in skilled trades. At an event last week in Washington, executives commiserated about how hard it was to find qualified people and swapped tips onstage for overcoming the gap.
“For every 20 job postings that we have, there is one qualified applicant right now,” said David Gitlin, chair and CEO of Carrier Global, which produces air conditioners and furnaces and services heating and cooling equipment.
A Monetarily Sovereign government should have no trouble addressing the problem. Use the farm subsidy approach. Pay factories to hire and train workers at higher wages and better conditions.
If the government funded higher wages and reduced work hours, interest in factory jobs would increase significantly.
In the previous post, “The Fallacy of Free Will,” we discussed the reasons why free will doesn’t actually exist. We explained that it is an illusion created by our brains to help us manage the overwhelming amount of stimuli we encounter every second.
I believe many readers view this argument as sophistry, convinced they possess free will. They experience it directly; they act on their desires and feel that nothing compels their actions.
The reason illusions are powerful is their compelling nature..
The best-known visual illusions are television and movies.
A television screen displays two-dimensional sequences of flashing colored dots, which your brain interprets as convincing, three-dimensional, continuously moving scenes.
A movie consists of a series of rapidly appearing, still, two-dimensional images. Your brain’s shortcut allows you to “see” a three-dimensional, continuously flowing scene.
Another common illusion is the railroad stop sign, which is composed of two alternately flashing lights.
Although the lights don’t move, the alternating flash gives the strong impression that a light is moving back and forth.
In both cases, your visual system sees every photon, but rather than take the time and the monumental effort to translate each one, your brain uses shortcuts. It translates the stream of individual photons into patterns you believe are motion.
It converts the flow of individual photons into patterns that you perceive as motion. You look at the stop sign, and you experience a moving light. No matter how hard you try, you cannot unsee that image.
Only if you cover one light will you see, or rather not see, motion.
That is how we always see. The brain combines trillions of photons entering the visual system every second into a coherent image we perceive as reality. However, that reality consists only of those trillions of photons. Everything you see is an illusion created by your brain.
Our vision is a miracle of evolution. Plants can sense photons, but they don’t see. They don’t put those photons together into a moving, three-dimensional world.
Visual illusions are common, but all sensory systems rely on shortcuts to illusions—experiences where perception diverges from external reality.
I asked AI to give me examples of other, non-visual illusions. Here is what it came up with.
1. Auditory Illusions
Shepard Tone: A series of tones that sound like they’re endlessly rising in pitch, but actually aren’t. Your brain gets tricked by overlapping frequency layers.
McGurk Effect: If you see a face mouthing “ga” while the audio says “ba,” your brain might hear “da.” The illusion comes from conflicting visual and auditory inputs.
Phantom Words: Repeating a short, meaningless audio loop causes people to start “hearing” actual words or phrases—your brain imposes meaning on ambiguous input.
Auditory Continuity Illusion: A sound briefly interrupted by noise is perceived as continuing through the noise. Your brain fills in the gap.
2. Tactile (Touch) IllusionsThermal Grill Illusion: Interlacing warm and cool bars creates a burning sensation, even though neither is dangerously hot.
Pinocchio Illusion: If you close your eyes, hold your nose, and vibrate your biceps tendon, you may feel your nose stretching. Your brain merges proprioceptive and tactile inputs into a bizarre body image.
Cutaneous Rabbit: Taps delivered rapidly at the wrist and then the elbow make people feel taps hopping up the arm. Your brain “fills in” where no contact occurred.
Phantom Vibration Syndrome: Feeling your phone buzz in your pocket when it didn’t. A culturally recent but neurologically real tactile illusion.
Sound-Induced Flash Illusion: Hearing two quick beeps can make you see a single flash as two flashes. Cross-modal illusions show how senses interact and co-create perception.
4. Olfactory (Smell) Illusions
Harder to pin down, but they do occur—often as context effects.
Imagined Smells: People in a “smelly” environment (e.g., told there’s gas or perfume in the air) often report odors even when none are present. Strong suggestion can conjure real olfactory experience.
Flavor Manipulation: Since taste is largely smell, context and expectation can warp it. The same smell labeled as “parmesan” vs. “vomit” will be perceived differently, even if physically identical.
5. Gustatory (Taste) IllusionsThese are typically context- or suggestion-based.
Miracle Fruit: This berry binds to taste receptors, making sour things taste sweet for a while. Not an illusion in the strictest sense, but the interpretation of taste is warped.
Color Influence on Flavor: The color of a drink (say, red) can make people taste “cherry” or “strawberry” even if it’s lemon-flavored. Visual input overrides chemical reality.
6. Proprioceptive IllusionsThese involve body position and motion.
Rotating Room Illusion: In a slowly rotating room, people feel as though they are tilting even when stationary. Your internal sense of gravity gets confused.
Out-of-Body Experiences (in lab settings): Through clever VR or mirrored feedback setups, researchers can induce a feeling of disembodiment, where your sense of self floats away from your body.
In summary, what you see, hear, taste, smell, and feel is not reality. Your brain translates photons into images, vibrations into sound, chemicals into taste and smell, and pressure into touch, whether it is light and shiver-inducing or hard and painful.
None of it is reality. It is translations, often faulty and misleading, though even when as accurate as humanly possible, they still are translations, just as the words “ice cream” or a photo of a sundae are not ice cream.
Here is how that relates to so-called “free will.”
1. Everything we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel is an illusion created by our brain and body. It is as real as a movie, a film, or a TV show.
2. Like all illusions. It may or may not represent some elements of reality, but we cannot know which. Our brain tries to represent enough reality so we will have heirs and they will have heirs.
3. We are not the result of survival of the fittest; rather, we represent the minimum needed for survival, more accurately described as the survival of just barely enough.
4. When it has excess energy, a life form’s population expands to meet the energy supply. That has been true of the human species, which has expanded because, for certain brief times, it has been more than barely enough. We may be nearing that limit.
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PS. Reader “tetrahedron720″ recently wrote to me saying: “I am free to shout in a library, but I can’t do anything about the sequence of reactions of the people around me who will Shhh me or toss me out.”
He is not free to shout in the library.
His brain has translated trillions upon trillions of stimuli into illusions that prevent him from shouting. No matter what he considers doing, the illusions created in his brain will be responsible.
Why are these experiences considered illusions? Tetrahedron720 relies solely on his unique history of receiving photons and other stimuli, which his brain has organized into his unique memories and beliefs. From these stimuli, he has created a distorted reality that influences his actions.
Had those same photons been received by another brain, they would have had a different effect, and produced a different reality.
He believes he is making a decision, but the decision is being made by his brain. There is no supreme “he” that overrides his brain’s actions.
He does not control his brain. His brain controls him.
And now, a question: (I enjoy posting rebuttals or questions about my own opinions, and I welcome them from you, so long as they aren’t simply, “You’re wrong, goodbye.”)
QUESTION: Everything I see, hear, smell, feel, and taste is nothing more than photons, atoms, and other stimuli translated by my brain. Those photons, etc., are the reality.
I’m conscious of the translations, not of the reality.For me, everything is an illusion, like seeing a movie of Hawaii while I sit in Florida.
Yet, while I live my life in an illusion, I still manage to move from point A to point B. I’m not surprised to awaken in point Z.
My life seems to have logical continuity. If this is all an illusion, who or what is the “script girl” that keeps everything in order?
(The old term “script girl” refers to the person on a movie set responsible for ensuring that details, like a cigarette held in the right hand in one scene, do not suddenly change to a handkerchief in the same hand in a subsequent scene.)
ANSWER: Predictive Coding Theory suggests the brain minimizes surprise by anticipating what’s about to happen.
Your brain translates photons to tell you that square “A” is darker than square “B.” but the reality is that they are the same shade. You never see reality. You see the brain’s translations. You run your life by the illusions your brain gives you.
The brain is not a passive receiver of data. It’s a prediction machine. It constantly compares incoming sensory input with past experience. Then it updates its predictions.
The Hollow Face Illusion A concave face looks convex because your brain expects faces to bulge outward. That expectation overrides the actual depth cues.
The dress (white/gold vs. blue/black): The brain guesses the lighting condition (cool shadow vs. warm light), then reconstructs the colors accordingly. It’s not just perception — it’s interpretation.
Memory
I do not perceive reality; I perceive the interpretation of the present plus the memory of the past. Continuity depends heavily on the consistency of memory.
Memory lets me link this moment to the one before it. Without memory, I’d still have perceptions, but they wouldn’t feel like part of a story. The illusion would shatter into isolated frames.
There are people who suffer from anterograde amnesia, where they can no longer form new short-term memories. They often feel like they’ve just “woken up,” even if it’s the tenth time today.
They may not remember eating, speaking, or being in a room. But their emotions often linger. They might not remember a conversation, but still “feel” trust or fear toward a person based on prior encounters they can’t recall.
Perception without memory is not reality as we know it. It’s a sequence of nows. The “script girl” is gone, and the illusion turns into a slideshow with no story.
Their brain has created a reality as real to them as yours is to you, but it is a reality that lacks continuity.
We each live in a different world, one created uniquely for each of us by our unique brains. My world is as real to me as yours is to you, but they are different worlds.
My beliefs and decisions reflect my perspectives just as yours reflect yours. My illusion is that somehow, my world is the “real” one, but it is upon those unique beliefs that all my decisions are based.
I do not rule my brain. There is no “I” that is apart from my brain. My brain rules me via its interpretations.
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 
