Rules of the Universe

The book's Part 3.6, "The Pinpoint as a Bubble of Data". Before the nova the pinpoint is a skin holding data within, and the points you see inside it are that data: massless, so each moves at exactly light speed, one skin cell a flip, and only its direction changes, at the skin. A datum that strikes the skin is written where it strikes: it lights that cell in its own colour and leaves with the cell's old colour, so lineage is exchanged, never made. The skin sends it back in as a hot wall does (Lambert's cosine law). The skin turns rigidly with the spin, as a Kerr horizon does, its equator at a_f / (1 + √(1 − a_f²)) of light speed (0.41 at a_f = 0.7, 0.94 near the limit), and drags the data it touches, so the data within swirls with the spin (measured: 0.99 of the skin's rate at a_f = 0.7). New data is born where the skin pulses and enters. The data within grows as (n + 1)² after n Tempos (Recursive Capacity Growth), and the bubble bursts, the Prime Data Nova, when it reaches the skin's record, χ_∂ = 16·4^L bits, one per skin cell: at Tempo 4·2^L − 1 (127 at level 5, 255 at level 6). Up to 1,200 points are drawn; past that each is an equal share of the data within, and its strike writes that share of cells. The pole-to-pole slosh, the latitude lag and the free-precession wobble are gone: a horizon turns as one.

After the nova the settings that were game couplings now follow the book and physics, and their sliders are gone. Data flow: massless data circulates at light speed, one cell a flip. Frame dragging: the flow's Lense–Thirring twist (the flat map's turn about its centre is gone). Spin coupling on the field: 0 (spin acts through the skin, the flow and the wells). Pinpoint processing: the bubble law above. Gravity: G is fixed when mass begins, at the physical layer, by the Rupture Rule: by the rupture everything has collapsed. Cold matter grows its contrast as δ₀·cosh(t/τ), 1/τ = √(4πGρ̄); the whole field starts at δ₀ = 1/√M and collapses at linear contrast 1.686 (spherical collapse), so T/τ = arccosh(1.686·√M) for the T flips left. Measured: by the end the densest tenth of the field holds 58 to 87% of the matter and 40 to 60% of it is nearly empty, the clumping growing through the life. Matter starts cold, at rest in the substrate; orbits, discs and spin come of the fall. Well pull and Well swirl: data falls in at the free-fall speed √(2GM/k) and turns at the Kepler rate √(GM/k³), plus the frames a spinning well drags, 2GJ/(𝒞→²k³) with J = a·G·M²/𝒞→, in the sense of the well's spin. Data wells, before the physical layer, hold data but do not pull: there is no G before mass. Wells fall too, under the matter's pull and each other's, and two that meet merge, keeping mass and momentum, the merged spin their whole angular momentum, a = J/(G·M²); the set orbit of wells born together is gone. Reset starts the same genesis again with a new pinpoint; Randomize (beside it) draws a whole new genesis: level, channel, mass ratio, axis and null mass, the poles at centre (f₀ stays the lineage's). The throat's glow and pulse fronts, which were drawing only, are gone; the flow itself carries the data out.

A universe's frame ratio: how many Zinf cycles one of its Pulse Tempos lasts. Data doubles exactly per level, so a Tempo carries 2^(L+1) bits and a flip (one Rhythm) 2^L; the heritage f^L stretches the time without adding data, which is why a universe processes more slowly than the Zinf by its heritage (f²⁰² ≈ 36.7 for ours). At the Zinf a flip is one bit, a Tempo two. The HUD's Bits count the whole field: every flip × 2^L from Start; before Start, the pinpoint's painted pixels × 2^(L+1).

ℨ is the same in every universe; each universe's Tempo is (2f)^L ℨ on the ladder. The Zinf Pulse Length is 𝒞→ℨ ≈ 6.845 × 10⁻⁹⁸ m and its Diameter half that; mass, energy and the rest are our Planck units divided by our s.

The game's grid follows the first: 4·2^L cells a side at level L. The real view at 202 is 10¹²² pixels at 1.855 × 10⁴³ Hz.

The remnant's spin from the two progenitors' spins a₁, a₂, their mass ratio and their misalignment θ_merge. A lone collapse has no orbital term. Equal masses with no spin give 0.686; two near-maximal Kerr holes give 0.998.

The merger compresses the clock. Our Kerr–Kerr origin sits at the floor, 0.932; a gas-cloud collapse at 1.000.

Each level doubles and inherits a little more: the heritage. Our f ≈ 1.018, so f²⁰² ≈ 36.7.

M_null/M_P 10⁶: Hyper-Genesis, a Tempo 10³ slower, slow-pulsing and long-lived · 1: Standard Genesis. A heavier well gives a slower child. No well forms below one Planck mass, so there is no lower row; failure is not set by mass (§6).

A flip is one Rhythm, a full cycle one Tempo and one frame. At n = 202 these return the Planck time, 5.391 × 10⁻⁴⁴ s, and a Diameter of half the Planck length, 8.08 × 10⁻³⁶ m.

A universe's Tempo and Length set its constants; ℏ_ℨ = ℏ/s² ≈ 1.892 × 10⁻¹⁵⁹ J·s is one bit held one Zinf tick. On the ladder light speed and G come out as ours; a heavier null mass slows the Tempo with the Length unchanged, so light speed falls and G falls as its fifth power. Boltzmann's constant is the one constant every universe shares. The readout shows each universe's 𝒞→, ℏ and G.

The UniSphere counts levels; a universe counts its own Tempos. The HUD shows both: own Tempos, and the bits they carried.

A universe spawns when its own count of full cycles reaches the UniSphere's capacity at its level. One Tempo is two engine steps (two flips), so a level-L universe lives 2^(L+1) steps from its Data Nova. Ours: 2²⁰² Tempos = 11.0 Gyr; at 13.8 Gyr we are past it.

The boundary information per well is an area law, so a child costs the two-thirds power of capacity and the count is the remaining third. Level 0 seeds one child; level 202 seeds 1.86 × 10²⁰, the black holes. A spinning well has less area, half at maximal spin, so the count rises by at most two.

The HUD's Energy is the flips so far times ℏ′/①⥂⧗⌂ of the universe's own constants.

What is on the field before Start is the information inside one pulse. At level 0 that pulse is one pixel, one Zinf; at every other level the whole palette you painted is the pulse, however wide. Start seals it and it processes.

The pinpoint overflows when its field has flipped once per cell: the birth, the inside-out turn onto the torus, and the universe's clock starts. Novas 2–4 open space, time and spacetime; after them come Harmonic Novas, inner layers that open no new direction. By Data Harmonics each layer is an octave below the one before, so the physical layer (3) is the fourth sub-harmonic of the data lattice (1). Wells need space: the Prime Data Nova makes none. From layer 2, the birth of space, a collapse (a nova or a fold) makes a data well: counted in the census and holding its basin, drawn hollow, but sending no rings and never orbiting, because a ring is a pulse in time. Layer 3, Temporal Genesis, is the physical layer: data runs at the Rhythm and the physical at the Tempo, which needs time, so there every data well becomes physical at once, and wells from then on are physical from birth. A data well that never reaches the physical layer still seeds its child. In 3D the Prime Data Nova bursts out the toroidal lattice as its crossing lines; with space the skin comes in faint; at the physical layer the field lights in full; each Harmonic Nova adds a ring. The HUD's Layer shows how far a universe has come out of its L + 1. A level-L universe can reach at most L + 1 layers, the last at its final well. A nova is a discharge: wells come from collapse, not from novas.

The universe is its own size at birth, one and a half times it halfway to its final well, and 2f times it when the final well forms. The pulse at its centre never changes size; it recedes only relative to the information that gathers around it. The HUD's Scale is this ratio and what one cell is worth in Zinfs.

The void is the pulse that was the whole universe before its nova, at its fixed size. In 3D the hole of the torus keeps its size and the tube grows; in 2D the void disc recedes as 1/scale. Nothing is lost into it: what folds or collapses is counted on the void's ledger, and strings are what comes back out.

The singularity is exactly the size of the hole it becomes: the pinpoint sphere's radius is the torus's inner radius, and by the Dilation rule the pulse never changes size, so its volume is the void while the tube grows round it. At the Data Nova the hole holds a haze of the pinpoint's residual data, which drifts out into the torus wall; at each harmonic half of what remains is swept out and the haze halves, so the hole clears by octaves (Data Harmonics). The data circulates through the hole: up the throat along the axis, over the top of the tube, down the outside and back in underneath, the poloidal circulation of a toroidal vortex, coupled with the spin: the data carries its angular momentum out with it, so for every cell it moves through the hole it moves a_f/H of a cell round the ring (H = R/r, the Harmonic Ratio), a spiral of steady pitch, tighter for a faster spin, the inner ring wound up to 1.5 times the outer by frame dragging (Lense–Thirring's 1/ρ³ shape); the torus body keeps its own slower turn, inherited through the nova. The spin has its own rate (the pinpoint's equator 0.8·a_f cells a flip), no longer the data flow's; the flow through the hole leads, 5 cells a flip by default. On the skin the outflow shows as it would to an observer: data fresh from the throat glows brightest and dims as it travels out over the tube, and the Source sends it in pulses, a bright front leaving the hole every 8 flips and riding outward at the flow's own speed, like ripples from a spring (only the drawing; the data is not changed). The hole is the throat of that circulation, not a drain: data crossing the inner equator passes through the hole and out again, counted on the Void readout as passing through the Source (the Data Loop), and in 3D a fountain in the data's own colours rises through the hole and spills over the top rim. Seen from inside, everything streams out of that one throat, the original singularity: the way the Big Bang appears as we look back toward our Data Nova. The void is the torus's hole: it touches the skin along the inner equator (v = π, nearest the axis), the throat. At the Data Nova the pinpoint's data is thrown off the inner equator onto the rest of the skin. Before the nova the pinpoint turns as a body about its spin axis, the torus's own axis, at its equator's rate, the arrow along the axis and the beaded ring showing its angular momentum; its higher latitudes lag (the Sun's differential rotation). Through the nova the angular momentum is kept: the inside-out turn carries the data outward, from a mean squared radius of R²/2 to 0.625·R², so the torus takes 0.8 of the pinpoint's angular velocity, and as the universe dilates its radius grows with the scale, so ω falls as 1/scale². Frame dragging carries the inner ring faster than the torus turns. Before Start two arrows show the spin: the angular momentum J along the axis through the poles, and the spin direction, an arrow on the equator facing you along the way the data moves there. Every universe starts with its poles at centre (tilt 0, the torus's own axis), and a drag that brings the axis within 8° of centre snaps to it. Both can be dragged: the axis arrow directly (its direction is J, its length the spin), and the spin arrow as the cue: pull its tip and the pull is the push v along the surface at r, so the axis becomes J = r × v (the whole universe turns about it) and how far you pull sets the spin, from 0 to 0.998. The game's spin comes from the progenitors, so the cue picks the genesis that gives the spin drawn: below 0.686 a lone collapse keeping its own spin, above it two equal spinning bodies merging, a₁ = a₂ = (a − 0.686)/0.5. Reset (and the page on opening) lays the pinpoint as the baked child of a random genesis: the whole sphere filled, as a child's is, a merger's two parents each a colour family, the second holding the share q/(1+q) of the sphere its mass ratio gives it along a soft boundary, a lone collapse's one parent alone, the colours drifting within each as lineage does and the phases in domains; Flow colours repaint only a pinpoint painted in one colour. Reset lays a new random field and draws a new genesis with it: the progenitors' spins, mass ratio and misalignment and the spin axis at random, so the spin a_f (the angular momentum) and the axis change too; the Zinf stays spinless. Harmonic 1's lines are a fine thread, the architecture that is not yet a dimension (Toroidal Genesis); at Harmonic 2 the lines of space replace them at full width over 6 steps (Dimensional Genesis). Every Nova is a harmonic of the data lattice and is named by its layer: Harmonic 1 · Toroidal Genesis, 2 · Dimensional, 3 · Temporal (the physical layer), 4 · Spacetime, then Harmonic 5, 6, … past saturation (the book's Harmonic Novas).

The Zinf universe has no spin: nothing orbits in one pulse. Spin is born of orbit, so the first time two wells of a spinless universe fall together the child carries a_f ≈ 0.686 from the orbital term alone. Wells born together orbit on screen for part of the universe's life, tightening and turning, and merge; the pop says "Spin is born" the first time.

Below level 3 a universe holds one well, so a lineage is a chain of single, growing universes until the first that can hold two. The Zinf is a chain, not a tree: each pulse is a whole life, 1 × 1 × 1 × 1. In the game the Zinf chain beats by itself at level 0 (switch in the panel), each beat a universe saved as the child of the last. The fractional counts are odds in the game's data, not something the engine is told.

At 2^L of its own Tempos the universe forms its final well: any wells still orbiting fall together. Then its data returns through its wells to the Source (℧) over 18 frames, twice as fast as a life's frames since nothing is left to process, in 2D as a fade, in 3D as the tube emptying. The census is saved beside what the law expects.

The return and the seeding are one event: the data a well returns to the Source is the recursion that seeds its child, one level deeper. A failed child seeds nothing and its data returns all the same; it is listed but cannot be played. The draw uses the book's 6% and is fixed by the level, the well and the census, so a replay fails the same children. The Zinf never fails.

Each well is worth one completion of the universe that made it, counted in Zinf cycles: 1 at level 0, ≈ 2.36 × 10⁶² for a well of ours. Credits add across universes and stay in this browser.

Every well pulses and every pulse sends a ring. Where rings from k wells meet in step a point repeats on the rings' beat: an interference node, deeper where more rings meet, the flower of life's own count (2 Common · 3 Uncommon · 4 Rare · 5 Epic · 6 Legendary). Until 24 October these were called time crystals; they are not: they repeat because their sources do, not by locking onto a beat of their own.

A discrete time crystal locks onto a period longer than the beat that drives it (Wilczek 2012; seen in trapped ions and diamond spins, 2017). In this field the drive is one flip, a Rhythm, and the plain pulse already answers at two, a Tempo: that doubling is the cell rule itself, so it is not counted. A time crystal is a region that settles on three flips or more. Rarity by beat: 3–4 Uncommon · 5–6 Rare · 7–8 Epic · 9+ Legendary, one step more for 256 cells or more.

Breather: a time-crystal lump of at most 32 cells inside an 8×8 box, in the pulsing field. Oscillon: the same lump standing alone, null all round. Soliton: a lump of 3–32 cells whose shape recurs k, 2k and 3k flips later, moved d, 2d and 3d. Néel crystal: every neighbour in the opposite phase, a checkerboard. Smectic stripes: one phase in layers, order in one direction only. Pulse lattice: any other pattern repeating in space; Wigner lattice when its pulses stand apart in null; Space-time crystal when its cells also beat at three flips or more. A lattice must repeat across a 9×9 neighbourhood and show three tiles each way. Quasicrystal: a bulk region (a full 17×17 interior) with no repeat at any shift up to 12 cells, built from at most 32 of the 512 possible 3×3 patches. Domain wall: a thin line, at least 12 cells, where one order is broken between two domains of the same order. Revival: the whole field back in a state it held, on a beat longer than 16 flips, seen three times. Cells carried by frame dragging inside the window are left out of every beat: rotation is not a period of their own. The first of each kind in a universe pops, every Epic or better, and otherwise one Rare-or-better every 12 flips; all are kept in the Collection.

Every find is checked against the catalog. The first sighting of a signature anywhere in PulseCore stops the universe and shows the discovery: the pattern drawn through its beat, its family and the physics it matches, and a field to name it. Only the run that found it may name it, once, and the name is credited to a signed-in account; names are 2 to 40 letters, digits, spaces, hyphens or apostrophes, unique, and can be renamed or hidden by the site's admin. A species new to you but known to PulseCore pops with its name and first finder. Any signed-in player may keep a label of their own on any species. Unclassified state: a bulk region (64 cells, eight across) that keeps changing, never repeating over the window or its last half, yet stays ordered (at most 48 distinct 3×3 patches over its last 8 flips) and fits no family above: the rarest find. "First ever" means first in PulseCore, never new to nature.

Filaments running out of the void. The void's ledger counts what went in; strings are what comes out. The first string of a universe pops, then Rare or better. Every one is saved and listed at Strings; the novas are at Nova Data, each with the universe's figures at that moment.

A cell is null (∅, never pulsed), or a pulser that is lit or dark. Once a cell has pulsed it never stops. There is no decay in life: dissipation is total and comes at the end.

A null cell is exposed to its lit neighbours. When the exposure reaches one whole pulse it bifurcates and lights. Exposure is never lost. The threshold is one pulse, not a number to tune.

A cell enclosed by its own phase carries no contrast and has no null to reverse into. A painted solid block folds its interior at its first pulse and keeps its boundary: field on the boundary, interior nulled. What folds goes to the void's ledger; a fold of sixteen cells or more is a micro null well and sends rings.

A universe is its level, its genesis, its pinpoint and its rule; everything after its first pulse is replay. The game writes one as a .ud file, Universe Data, from the Lineage panel: the seed, the record it produced, the lineage, and a hash that is the universe's id. Depth is provable because anyone can replay the seed and compare the census.

The largest level whose whole life one processor replays in ten seconds. Measured on one core of this server, 13 October 2026, with this game's loop: level 7, so 195 levels behind our universe at 202. The figure lives in ten-second.json.

A system that holds our universe's packet and is phase-aligned with its pulse is a null well of this universe and bifurcates at level 203. The book's singularity and its ending are the same event.