Vacuum Memory Cosmology: Building the Hypothesis Brick by Brick
By Michael J. Ruse
Science, it seems to me, begins in disobedience, not toward truth itself, but toward the lazy versions of it. Certainly not in all matters, but I’ve never believed mystery should be treated as a placeholder for ignorance, because it’s literally the raw material of discovery. And yet, much of modern physics treats mystery like a clerical error - something to be “cleaned up” or politely ignored until the math behaves again. Remember, I’m not a ‘physicist’ by trade. Just like I’m not a professional auto mechanic or farmer - but I can rebuild an engine and grow acres of tomatoes and potatoes like nobody’s business. Cosmology, physics, consciousness - it’s my garage and barn when I’m not earning a living. Sure, you can get your veggies from one of the big guys, or have Mr. Goodwrench replace your alternator, but my performance of the same service will be half the cost - just no “100 point” checklist (which is almost never, ever done anyways).
In other words, I don’t have a lab. What I do have, is time, books/journals, access, math, awareness, passion, wonder and a night sky to fiddle with. I’m sometimes snarky about “gatekeepers”, the anointed ones who tell us what’s good science and bad - but I’ll never disparage their genius of which have provided me the tools I use to chase the “bad” science. I just want to be clear about that. The more I understand the mechanisms in place that make each thing tangibly real, the more indebted I feel that men and women exist in this modern and easy world of “content creation”, to study and present the multi-faceted world of physics and its relation to the universe and our very being. Right or wrong - I’ll listen to any idea that falls within my niche.
The two biggest “errors” of modern cosmology are dark matter and dark energy - invisible components that supposedly make up 95% of everything. We see their fingerprints in the rotation of galaxies and in the accelerating expansion of space, but not the thing itself. So scientists built models, ran simulations, and declared them solved by proxy. But deep down, I don’t think anyone believes that’s the end of the story. It feels like we’ve mistaken a symptom for the mechanism.
That’s where Fritz Zwicky comes in and his art of Morphological Thinking.
Zwicky, the Swiss-American astronomer who coined “dark matter,” had a temperament I both deeply respect and dislike. He didn’t believe science should march single-file behind established assumptions. He invented what he called the morphological method - a way of exploring the full space of possibilities before narrowing into equations. To Zwicky, imagination wasn’t the opposite of rigor, it was the beginning of it.
He once said that scientists too often confuse “the possible” with “the permitted.” He seemingly had no patience for that. He believed every unexplained observation should be treated as a dimensional space of unknowns, and that a scientist’s job was to map that space, not prematurely fill it. In my own work - particularly in The Topological Resonance Hypothesis and later in The Fractal Vacuum Resonance Hypothesis - I’ve taken a similar approach. I treat reality as an echo chamber, a memory field, a resonant topology that records what passes through it.
Anyhow, Zwicky didn’t just name “dark matter.” He demanded that we ask what kind of cosmos could produce such effects without inventing invisible particles. That, to me, remains the right question.
What was it about him I think I would have disliked? An apparent curmudgeon with zero couth if someone disagreed with his assessments. But who knows, those individual parts of him may be misinterpretations. I had a Geology professor at Norwich University during my undergraduate studies named Professor Fred Larkin, who was playfully referred to as “Fossil Fred”. By all appearances - it would be easy to label him a curmudgeon. But his passion, his knowledge? Legendary to me. His infectious courses remain my favorites. If you liked rocks, he liked you.
The Morphological Space of the Vacuum
The idea that spacetime itself could remember isn’t new - it lingers in the equations of general relativity and in the perturbations of quantum field theory. Every interaction leaves an imprint, however small. But physics, so far, has treated these imprints as mathematical formalities rather than as physical phenomena in their own right.
My question has always been simple: what if the vacuum doesn’t immediately forget?
Suppose curvature, once generated by mass-energy, doesn’t vanish instantly when that source moves on. Suppose it lingers - like a gravitational afterimage - gradually releasing its stored curvature over cosmic timescales. Locally, that residual curvature would deepen gravitational wells, binding galaxies more tightly than visible matter alone allows. On the largest scales, the gradual relaxation of that stored curvature would stretch spacetime itself, driving the acceleration we attribute to dark energy.
Both effects - galactic binding and cosmic expansion - would then be two expressions of the same underlying process: the vacuum’s delayed response to its own history. That’s what I’m calling Vacuum Memory Cosmology in a sentence.
To formalize it, I introduced a new term into Einstein’s field equations: a memory tensor, M_{\mu\nu}. It represents curvature stored within the vacuum that has not yet decayed. Its evolution follows a relaxation law - not unlike what happens in a viscoelastic medium, where stress slowly dissipates instead of snapping back instantly.
The governing idea of this is simple: The vacuum retains curvature from past events and releases it over time.
Mathematically, this introduces a sort of delay - a finite relaxation time \tau_v — into spacetime’s response to mass-energy. That’s the bridge between General Relativity and observable anomalies. When the relaxation time is on the order of 10^{10} years, the model naturally reproduces the scale of galactic halos and the late-time acceleration of the universe.
In other words, I’m saying there are no exotic particles. There exists no cosmological constant. Just a vacuum that remembers.
What This Means Physically
You can think of spacetime as a kind of cosmic viscoelastic medium. When mass bends it, that curvature doesn’t disappear right away when the mass moves. Instead, it reverberates. The “echo” of curvature acts as an additional source of gravitational potential - what we call dark matter. Over billions of years, that stored curvature relaxes, releasing its energy as a slow, metric expansion - what we call dark energy. It’s the same mechanism, just on a different scale.
This perspective doesn’t contradict General Relativity; it extends it. General Relativity assumes spacetime reacts instantaneously to stress-energy. Vacuum Memory Cosmology relaxes that assumption - literally. It says: what if spacetime reacts over time, not at once? That’s the entire leap.
Predictions and Tests
I feel like I’m always repeating this, but this isn’t me sitting here wordsmithing. It is testable physics. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be bothering with it. Or bothering anyone else with it.
Bullet point time - and from what I gather based on my previous works, if the vacuum has a measurable memory timescale, it should leave signatures across several domains:
• Gravitational lensing: light bending around galaxy clusters should show slight temporal offsets between the visible baryonic matter and the lensing center - the ghost of curvature not yet relaxed.
• Redshift drift: over decades, light from distant quasars should exhibit tiny deviations from the $\Lambda$CDM redshift curve, as the universe’s expansion rate reflects a thawing vacuum response.
• CMB anomalies: if curvature persists from recombination, it should slightly amplify low-frequency multipoles in the cosmic microwave background - a kind of fossilized memory pattern.
Each of these is falsifiable with present or near-future observatories: JWST, Euclid, the Vera Rubin Observatory, ELT, and the Simons Array. The predictions are small, but not beyond reach.
Science, Mystery, and Zwicky’s Lesson
I like to think that Dr. Zwicky would have liked this kind of heresy. He spent his career insisting that imagination is not a threat to science - but rather that stagnation is. He’d have said that when the math stops answering, the morphology should begin. And to me, he’d be right.
The irony of the dark sector is that it may not be “dark” at all - it may simply be the past, still resonating. The vacuum, viewed this way, isn’t a void to be filled with guesses. It’s a record. A living ledger of curvature, still humming with the memory of everything that’s ever happened.
When scientists call something “dark,” they’re often just admitting that they’ve run out of light to see it. Not to over-romanticize the man, but I think Zwicky’s method tells us to build new light, not new particles.
If this model is right, then every galaxy, every atom, every beam of light is part of a single, ongoing conversation between what was and what remains. The universe is not expanding into nothing - it’s relaxing into itself. It carries memory not in our minds, but in its own geometry. And one day, when the echoes of everything fade, they won’t be gone. They’ll simply be stored - woven into the still fabric of the vacuum.
The vacuum is not empty, and it’s very possible that it remembers. If so inclined I welcome anyone to peruse/challenge/critique/expand the hypothesis in the attached following pdf. Like all my other work, I’m aware that improvements can be made, but they wouldn’t be *mine*. I’ve taken it as far as my level of knowledge can take it, and present it as-is, as my own.
References
• Einstein, A. (1916). The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity. Annalen der Physik.
• Zwicky, F. (1948). Morphological Astronomy. The Observatory, Vol. 68.
• Rubin, V. & Ford, W. (1980). Rotation of the Andromeda Nebula. Astrophysical Journal.
• Riess, A. G. et al. (1998). Observational Evidence from Supernovae for an Accelerating Universe. Astronomical Journal.
• Peebles, P. J. E. (2020). Cosmology’s Century. Princeton University Press.
• Ruse, M. J. (2025). The Topological Resonance Hypothesis. AtomicDrift.com.
• Ruse, M. J. (2025). The Fractal Vacuum Resonance Hypothesis. AtomicDrift.com.
• Ruse, M. J. (2025). The Threshold Information Loss Hypothesis. AtomicDrift.com.
By Michael J. Ruse
Science, it seems to me, begins in disobedience, not toward truth itself, but toward the lazy versions of it. Certainly not in all matters, but I’ve never believed mystery should be treated as a placeholder for ignorance, because it’s literally the raw material of discovery. And yet, much of modern physics treats mystery like a clerical error - something to be “cleaned up” or politely ignored until the math behaves again. Remember, I’m not a ‘physicist’ by trade. Just like I’m not a professional auto mechanic or farmer - but I can rebuild an engine and grow acres of tomatoes and potatoes like nobody’s business. Cosmology, physics, consciousness - it’s my garage and barn when I’m not earning a living. Sure, you can get your veggies from one of the big guys, or have Mr. Goodwrench replace your alternator, but my performance of the same service will be half the cost - just no “100 point” checklist (which is almost never, ever done anyways).
In other words, I don’t have a lab. What I do have, is time, books/journals, access, math, awareness, passion, wonder and a night sky to fiddle with. I’m sometimes snarky about “gatekeepers”, the anointed ones who tell us what’s good science and bad - but I’ll never disparage their genius of which have provided me the tools I use to chase the “bad” science. I just want to be clear about that. The more I understand the mechanisms in place that make each thing tangibly real, the more indebted I feel that men and women exist in this modern and easy world of “content creation”, to study and present the multi-faceted world of physics and its relation to the universe and our very being. Right or wrong - I’ll listen to any idea that falls within my niche.
The two biggest “errors” of modern cosmology are dark matter and dark energy - invisible components that supposedly make up 95% of everything. We see their fingerprints in the rotation of galaxies and in the accelerating expansion of space, but not the thing itself. So scientists built models, ran simulations, and declared them solved by proxy. But deep down, I don’t think anyone believes that’s the end of the story. It feels like we’ve mistaken a symptom for the mechanism.
That’s where Fritz Zwicky comes in and his art of Morphological Thinking.
Zwicky, the Swiss-American astronomer who coined “dark matter,” had a temperament I both deeply respect and dislike. He didn’t believe science should march single-file behind established assumptions. He invented what he called the morphological method - a way of exploring the full space of possibilities before narrowing into equations. To Zwicky, imagination wasn’t the opposite of rigor, it was the beginning of it.
He once said that scientists too often confuse “the possible” with “the permitted.” He seemingly had no patience for that. He believed every unexplained observation should be treated as a dimensional space of unknowns, and that a scientist’s job was to map that space, not prematurely fill it. In my own work - particularly in The Topological Resonance Hypothesis and later in The Fractal Vacuum Resonance Hypothesis - I’ve taken a similar approach. I treat reality as an echo chamber, a memory field, a resonant topology that records what passes through it.
Anyhow, Zwicky didn’t just name “dark matter.” He demanded that we ask what kind of cosmos could produce such effects without inventing invisible particles. That, to me, remains the right question.
What was it about him I think I would have disliked? An apparent curmudgeon with zero couth if someone disagreed with his assessments. But who knows, those individual parts of him may be misinterpretations. I had a Geology professor at Norwich University during my undergraduate studies named Professor Fred Larkin, who was playfully referred to as “Fossil Fred”. By all appearances - it would be easy to label him a curmudgeon. But his passion, his knowledge? Legendary to me. His infectious courses remain my favorites. If you liked rocks, he liked you.
The Morphological Space of the Vacuum
The idea that spacetime itself could remember isn’t new - it lingers in the equations of general relativity and in the perturbations of quantum field theory. Every interaction leaves an imprint, however small. But physics, so far, has treated these imprints as mathematical formalities rather than as physical phenomena in their own right.
My question has always been simple: what if the vacuum doesn’t immediately forget?
Suppose curvature, once generated by mass-energy, doesn’t vanish instantly when that source moves on. Suppose it lingers - like a gravitational afterimage - gradually releasing its stored curvature over cosmic timescales. Locally, that residual curvature would deepen gravitational wells, binding galaxies more tightly than visible matter alone allows. On the largest scales, the gradual relaxation of that stored curvature would stretch spacetime itself, driving the acceleration we attribute to dark energy.
Both effects - galactic binding and cosmic expansion - would then be two expressions of the same underlying process: the vacuum’s delayed response to its own history. That’s what I’m calling Vacuum Memory Cosmology in a sentence.
To formalize it, I introduced a new term into Einstein’s field equations: a memory tensor, M_{\mu\nu}. It represents curvature stored within the vacuum that has not yet decayed. Its evolution follows a relaxation law - not unlike what happens in a viscoelastic medium, where stress slowly dissipates instead of snapping back instantly.
The governing idea of this is simple: The vacuum retains curvature from past events and releases it over time.
Mathematically, this introduces a sort of delay - a finite relaxation time \tau_v — into spacetime’s response to mass-energy. That’s the bridge between General Relativity and observable anomalies. When the relaxation time is on the order of 10^{10} years, the model naturally reproduces the scale of galactic halos and the late-time acceleration of the universe.
In other words, I’m saying there are no exotic particles. There exists no cosmological constant. Just a vacuum that remembers.
What This Means Physically
You can think of spacetime as a kind of cosmic viscoelastic medium. When mass bends it, that curvature doesn’t disappear right away when the mass moves. Instead, it reverberates. The “echo” of curvature acts as an additional source of gravitational potential - what we call dark matter. Over billions of years, that stored curvature relaxes, releasing its energy as a slow, metric expansion - what we call dark energy. It’s the same mechanism, just on a different scale.
This perspective doesn’t contradict General Relativity; it extends it. General Relativity assumes spacetime reacts instantaneously to stress-energy. Vacuum Memory Cosmology relaxes that assumption - literally. It says: what if spacetime reacts over time, not at once? That’s the entire leap.
Predictions and Tests
I feel like I’m always repeating this, but this isn’t me sitting here wordsmithing. It is testable physics. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be bothering with it. Or bothering anyone else with it.
Bullet point time - and from what I gather based on my previous works, if the vacuum has a measurable memory timescale, it should leave signatures across several domains:
• Gravitational lensing: light bending around galaxy clusters should show slight temporal offsets between the visible baryonic matter and the lensing center - the ghost of curvature not yet relaxed.
• Redshift drift: over decades, light from distant quasars should exhibit tiny deviations from the $\Lambda$CDM redshift curve, as the universe’s expansion rate reflects a thawing vacuum response.
• CMB anomalies: if curvature persists from recombination, it should slightly amplify low-frequency multipoles in the cosmic microwave background - a kind of fossilized memory pattern.
Each of these is falsifiable with present or near-future observatories: JWST, Euclid, the Vera Rubin Observatory, ELT, and the Simons Array. The predictions are small, but not beyond reach.
Science, Mystery, and Zwicky’s Lesson
I like to think that Dr. Zwicky would have liked this kind of heresy. He spent his career insisting that imagination is not a threat to science - but rather that stagnation is. He’d have said that when the math stops answering, the morphology should begin. And to me, he’d be right.
The irony of the dark sector is that it may not be “dark” at all - it may simply be the past, still resonating. The vacuum, viewed this way, isn’t a void to be filled with guesses. It’s a record. A living ledger of curvature, still humming with the memory of everything that’s ever happened.
When scientists call something “dark,” they’re often just admitting that they’ve run out of light to see it. Not to over-romanticize the man, but I think Zwicky’s method tells us to build new light, not new particles.
If this model is right, then every galaxy, every atom, every beam of light is part of a single, ongoing conversation between what was and what remains. The universe is not expanding into nothing - it’s relaxing into itself. It carries memory not in our minds, but in its own geometry. And one day, when the echoes of everything fade, they won’t be gone. They’ll simply be stored - woven into the still fabric of the vacuum.
The vacuum is not empty, and it’s very possible that it remembers. If so inclined I welcome anyone to peruse/challenge/critique/expand the hypothesis in the attached following pdf. Like all my other work, I’m aware that improvements can be made, but they wouldn’t be *mine*. I’ve taken it as far as my level of knowledge can take it, and present it as-is, as my own.
References
• Einstein, A. (1916). The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity. Annalen der Physik.
• Zwicky, F. (1948). Morphological Astronomy. The Observatory, Vol. 68.
• Rubin, V. & Ford, W. (1980). Rotation of the Andromeda Nebula. Astrophysical Journal.
• Riess, A. G. et al. (1998). Observational Evidence from Supernovae for an Accelerating Universe. Astronomical Journal.
• Peebles, P. J. E. (2020). Cosmology’s Century. Princeton University Press.
• Ruse, M. J. (2025). The Topological Resonance Hypothesis. AtomicDrift.com.
• Ruse, M. J. (2025). The Fractal Vacuum Resonance Hypothesis. AtomicDrift.com.
• Ruse, M. J. (2025). The Threshold Information Loss Hypothesis. AtomicDrift.com.
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