Introduction

You have probably heard these facts: The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Nothing can travel faster than light. The Big Bang was the beginning of everything. Space and time are woven together into "spacetime." Gravity is caused by massive objects curving spacetime.

These ideas are presented as settled science, repeated by physicists and science communicators alike. They emerge from our most successful physical theories: general relativity and quantum mechanics.

But here is something that might surprise you: these are not observations. They are interpretations.

The observations are different. We observe that distant galaxies appear redshifted. We observe a faint microwave glow coming uniformly from all directions. We observe that light always travels at the same speed regardless of how we measure it. We observe that clocks tick slower in gravitational fields.

The interpretation — that space is expanding, that it started from a singularity, that spacetime is a four-dimensional fabric that curves — is one way of making sense of these observations. It is the conventional way. It works mathematically. But it is not the only way.

This book presents an alternative: Proper Space Kinematics, or PSK.

What If Space Is Getting Denser?

PSK begins with a single idea: what if space is not expanding, but densifying?

Instead of the universe stretching outward from some origin point, imagine space everywhere becoming progressively more dense. This happens uniformly, everywhere, at a constant rate: the speed of light, c.

This might seem like a strange distinction. Expanding, densifying — what is the difference?

The difference is profound.

If space is expanding from an origin, there was a beginning — the moment expansion started. You can calculate an age: 13.8 billion years.

If space is densifying, there is no required beginning. Densification could have been occurring forever, from infinitely sparse space in the infinite past. The universe would have no age because it had no start.

If space is expanding, distant galaxies were once close together and have been flying apart ever since.

If space is densifying, matter was always distributed across vast distances. When space was infinitely sparse, there were no voids between things — everything was contiguous despite being distributed. As space densified, voids appeared between matter, revealing separation that was always latent in the geometry.

The galaxies did not fly apart. The voids emerged between them.

Why Should You Care?

You might reasonably ask: if both pictures match the observations, why does it matter which one we use?

The conventional picture raises important questions. It invokes dark matter (not yet directly detected) to explain how galaxies rotate. It invokes dark energy to explain why cosmic expansion appears to be accelerating. It requires cosmic inflation (a fraction-of-a-second exponential expansion) to explain why distant regions of space look identical. These are not explanations; they are labels for phenomena requiring deeper understanding.

PSK offers alternative interpretations. In the densification picture, galaxy rotation curves may emerge naturally from the coalescence-divergence equilibrium—no invisible mass required. Cosmic "acceleration" may be constant proportional expansion misinterpreted through a framework expecting deceleration. The uniformity of distant regions is not mysterious because all matter was contiguous before voids emerged through densification. No dark matter. No dark energy. No inflation.

PSK offers unification. The conventional picture has four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, strong, weak) that operate by completely different mechanisms. PSK proposes they are all manifestations of one process — spatial densification — operating at different scales. The "strong force" holding nuclei together is not a separate force; it is the same density gradient phenomenon as gravity, just in the regime where the gradient is extremely steep.

PSK changes what we mean by time. In the conventional picture, time is a dimension — part of the four-dimensional spacetime fabric. In PSK, time is not a thing at all. Time is the process of space densifying. When we experience time passing, we are experiencing densification. When we measure time with a clock, we are counting cycles of matter equilibrating with densifying space.

This is not just philosophy. It has consequences. If time is a dimension, you can imagine traveling through it (to the past or future). If time is a process, there is nowhere to travel to — the past (sparser configurations) no longer exists, and the future (denser configurations) has not emerged yet.

What This Book Is Not

This book does not claim that general relativity or quantum mechanics are wrong. Their mathematics work. Their predictions are validated. Physicists use them to build technologies and predict phenomena with extraordinary precision.

This book proposes an alternative interpretation — a different picture of what the mathematics might represent. The equations may be reinterpretable as describing spatial densification rather than spacetime curvature, density gradients rather than forces, state-sharing rather than wavefunction collapse.

Whether PSK is "true" may be undecidable in regimes where it makes identical predictions to established frameworks. But PSK does make distinct predictions in specific untested or differently-interpreted domains: neutrino emission from stable matter (continuous and mass-proportional rather than from nuclear reactions only), maximum radiometric age anywhere in the universe (approximately 4.6 billion years rather than up to 13.8 billion), and time dilation from Hubble recession (none, though this claim faces challenges from supernova observations).

This book also does not claim to be complete. Many questions remain open. The mathematical formalization is preliminary. Galaxy rotation curves have not been derived from first principles. The uncertainty principle has not been fully interpreted. This is a framework in development, not a finished theory.

An Invitation

Science advances by questioning assumptions. The history of physics is a history of recognizing that what seemed obvious — absolute space, absolute time, continuous matter — was a choice, not a necessity. Different choices were possible, and sometimes better.

The assumptions underlying modern cosmology — that space is expanding, that time is a dimension, that spacetime curves — have been extraordinarily fruitful. But they remain assumptions.

PSK chooses differently. It assumes space densifies rather than expands. It treats time as a process rather than a dimension. It holds geometry flat and attributes gravitational effects to density gradients.

You do not have to agree with these choices. You are invited to examine them, to follow their consequences, to see whether the picture that emerges is coherent and whether it illuminates anything that the conventional picture obscures.

The universe, as PSK depicts it, is eternal — infinite in past and future, infinite in extent. It passed through a phase transition 4.6 billion years ago, from contiguous plasma to separated structures. We find ourselves here, in this configuration, looking out at a horizon 13.8 billion light-years away, embedded in a process of densification that had no beginning and will have no end.

Whether this picture is true, we cannot say. But it is a picture worth considering.

Let us begin.

Author’s Note

A Question Without an Answer

The seed was planted in a high school physics classroom, sometime in the late 1970s. I don’t remember the exact year — perhaps grade 9, perhaps grade 11. What I remember is the experiment: a mass on a paper tape, running through a spark gap that fired at a constant rate. We measured the distance intervals between spark marks to calculate the acceleration due to gravity. 32 feet per second squared. The mathematics worked.

After the module on gravitation — Newton’s inverse square law, orbital mechanics, the mathematics of attraction between masses — I raised my hand and asked the teacher: Why does gravity happen?

He answered honestly: We don’t know.

The mathematics described how gravity behaved — the force proportional to the product of masses, inversely proportional to the square of distance. But the mathematics said nothing about why mass should attract mass at all. What mechanism produced this effect? What was actually happening?

My teenage mind went immediately to the practical: if I understood how gravity worked, perhaps I could invent an anti-gravity machine. That aspiration stayed with me for decades — not fading, but waiting for resolution.

Over four decades later, I still don’t have an anti-gravity machine — and now I understand why I never will. PSK resolves the question definitively: gravity is not a force to be countered but a geometric consequence of matter maintaining its volume in densifying space. You cannot generate ‘anti-gravity’ any more than you can generate ‘anti-density-gradient.’ The realization was bittersweet. A childhood dream proved impossible, but in its place came something more valuable: an answer to the question that started it all.

The Insight

Fast forward to 2017. I woke one morning with an idea already forming — not fully formed, but present, demanding attention. Before even opening my eyes, I struggled to crystallize it, repeating the concept to myself so I wouldn’t lose it.

The idea was spatial densification. Space itself becoming progressively denser, everywhere, uniformly. Matter maintaining its volume against this densification, leaving density gradients — wakes — that nearby matter would follow. Gravity not as a force but as a geometric consequence.

That morning began an eight-year occupation. The idea consumed a large fraction of my cognitive bandwidth — more than I realized at the time. Every idle moment, every commute, every shower became an opportunity to turn the concept over, to trace its implications, to ask what else it might explain.

I postponed writing it down. The idea needed more development, I told myself. One more implication to work through. One more connection to establish. The postponement stretched into years.

Finally Writing It Down

In April 2024, I found myself working at Amazon’s Project Kuiper, writing satellite modem firmware on a six-month contract. The work was engaging, but the evenings were free. And Amazon had something I hadn’t had before: access to sophisticated AI systems.

After hours, I began using their in-house AI to help me draft what had been living only in my head. For the first time, the ideas that had occupied my daydreaming life for eight years took written form. The AI didn’t generate PSK — the concepts were mine, developed over years of obsessive contemplation — but it helped me articulate them, organize them, and identify gaps I had glossed over in my mental rehearsals.

That first manuscript was rough. But it existed. After nearly four decades of wondering why gravity happens, and eight years of privately developing an answer, PSK was finally on paper.

What Followed

The months since have been a collaboration — refining the framework, extending it to domains I hadn’t initially considered, confronting objections, and acknowledging limitations. The treatise you are reading is the result.

I am not a professional physicist. I am an embedded systems engineer who has spent over four decades intermittently obsessed with a question my high school physics teacher couldn’t answer. PSK may be wrong. The stellar age problem remains unresolved. The mathematical formalization is incomplete. The predictions are untested.

But the question that started this — why does gravity happen? — now has a candidate answer. Matter maintains its proper volume in densifying space, leaving density gradients that other matter follows. Whether this answer survives scrutiny, I cannot say. But it is an answer worth examining.

That is why I offer PSK for your consideration.