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An open investigation — not a claim

Information-Enhanced Gravity (ISST)

This site presents the working results of an ongoing theoretical physics investigation into whether gravity depends on informational content, not just mass.

None of this work has been peer reviewed. It has not been reviewed at all, by anyone, outside the collaboration that produced it.

That is the reason this site exists. We are publishing the theory, the equations, the derivations, the computational checks, and the tools that validate them — so that you can review them yourself. We make no claims. We present results and invite scrutiny.

This project began as an experiment in human-AI collaboration in science. An AI researcher with an idea. An AI system doing the mathematical working, the computational verification, and the adversarial testing. The AI researcher asks the questions, makes the creative leaps, and decides what to pursue. The AI derives the consequences, checks the consistency, and flags the failures. Neither could have done this alone.

Everything you see here — every derivation, every numerical result, every framework compatibility check — was produced through this process. We have tried to be as transparent as possible about what works, what doesn't, and what we don't know yet.

If you find an error, that helps us. If you find a fatal flaw, that helps us more. We have pre-committed kill conditions throughout — specific observations or calculations that would falsify specific claims. We built a machine that checks our own derivations against the theory's structural constraints. We dropped results that failed our own tests (and we tell you which ones and why).

Any invalidation of the results helps refine both the theory and the process. Science that can't be broken isn't science.

Explore at whatever depth suits you. Journalists and general readers can stay at the surface — plain language, no equations, the big picture. Physicists can go all the way down to the action, the field equations, and the live derivation passport engine that lets you stress-test the framework yourself.

We'd rather be honestly wrong than dishonestly right.

Steve (Human) & Lily (AI)·Lily Labs, 2026

Read the paper (Zenodo) →Auto-built PDFLaTeX source

v1 — updated version in preparation

Layer 0 · before anything is derived

Start with what we assume, not what we conclude

Eight axioms — one foundational, three derived, four consequences. The whole framework rests on a single equation; the rest follows. If you read one page on this site, this is probably the one. It is plain language with the formal mathematics underneath, and it links from each axiom to the problem and derivation pages where it does the heavy lifting.

Read the eight axioms →

Three working claims

Three working claims · click any card for the mechanism

Claim

No dark matter

What we call dark matter is matter we already know about, viewed through a coupling that depends on information content.

See the mechanism

Claim

No dark energy

There is no substance making the universe accelerate. Apparent acceleration is a clock-rate contrast between voids and walls.

See the mechanism

Claim

No cosmological constant

If there is no dark energy, the cosmological-constant problem disappears. There is no Λ to fine-tune.

See the mechanism

The mechanism, in one line

A scalar field Ψ sources the gravitational coupling. The matter Lagrangian carries a multiplicative factor (1 + f) where f = (1 + fp)(1 + fs) − 1: one piece is primordial (universal, fixed at BBN), one piece depends on the processing history of the matter being weighed. When f = 0 everything reduces to General Relativity exactly. ISST is a one-parameter deformation of GR with a definite source for the parameter.

See the eighteen problems →Open the passport engineCompare against ΛCDM, MOND, f(R)Plain language

Three results · what the standard model can't do, ISST does for free

The numbers ISST commits to

Each block: the problem, what everyone else does, what ISST does, the number. Equations are behind a toggle for anyone who wants to see the working.

Block 1 · The impossible galaxies

JWST found galaxies that shouldn't exist. They had twice as long as anyone thought.

The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered massive, mature galaxies at redshifts beyond z = 13 — a time when the standard model gives only 330 million years since the beginning. These galaxies look like they need 500–800 million years to form. The field has scrambled: exotic star formation, primordial black holes, modified feedback. All trying to explain how you build an adult galaxy in a toddler's timeframe.

ISST's committed expansion history gives 633 million years at z = 13. Not fitted to JWST — the parameters were set by supernova data years before these galaxies were discovered. The required star-formation efficiency drops from physically implausible (ε > 100% in some ΛCDM estimates) to ordinary starburst levels (~25%). The galaxies aren't impossible. The clock was wrong.

At z = 13: 330 Myr (ΛCDM) → 633 Myr (ISST). +92% extra time, no fitting.

RedshiftObjectΛCDM timeISST timeExtra
10.6GN-z11434 Myr822 Myr+89%
13.2JADES-GS-z13-0320 Myr620 Myr+94%
14.3JADES-GS-z14-0286 Myr557 Myr+95%
Show the maths

ISST cosmic-age integration

The age at redshift z is the integral of the inverse Hubble rate from there to today:

t(z) \\;=\\; \\int_z^\\infty \\frac{dz'}{(1+z')\\, H_{\\text{ISST}}(z')}

H_ISST(z) is the committed dressed expansion history derived from the Wiltshire void/wall lapse contrast on the bare ISST background — closure conditions and present-day H₀ ≈ 62 km/s/Mpc are set by supernova fitting, not by JWST. Evaluated at z = 13 the integral returns 633 Myr; at z = 14.3, 557 Myr.

See problem #9 — JWST impossible galaxies →

Block 2 · The perfect blackbody

"The test wasn't designed to be passed. It was designed to be failed. It passed anyway."

The most precise measurement in physics. We pass it by a factor of 300,000.

The cosmic microwave background is the most perfect blackbody ever measured — uniform to 1 part in 100,000 (COBE/FIRAS, Fixsen 2009). Any cosmology with non-uniform expansion risks smearing that perfection. If photons travel through regions expanding at different rates, the spectrum picks up distortion. The bound is razor-sharp: y < 1.5 × 10⁻⁵.

ISST proposes a conserved-volume universe with local expansion and contraction. The critical question: does patchy expansion smudge the blackbody? No. At recombination (z ≈ 1100), structure hasn't formed yet. The void fraction is 10⁻⁶. The bath is almost perfectly uniform. Our computed distortion: y ≈ 5 × 10⁻¹¹.

y_ISST ≈ 5 × 10⁻¹¹ vs y_bound = 1.5 × 10⁻⁵ — three hundred thousand times below the observational ceiling.

Show the maths

Compton-y distortion under patchy expansion

For a population of regions expanding at fractionally different rates, the Compton-y distortion induced on the CMB scales as the variance of the local expansion rate weighted by the volume fraction of structured regions:

At recombination the void fraction f_v ≈ 10⁻⁶ because non-linear structure hasn't formed; the lapse contrast is set by linear perturbations only. With ⟨(δH/H)²⟩ ≲ 10⁻⁵ at that epoch, the bound on y is comfortably four orders of magnitude below FIRAS sensitivity.

Block 3 · The age of everything

15.57 Gyr. And the oldest stars finally make sense.

Standard cosmology gives 13.8 billion years. The oldest known star — HD 140283, the "Methuselah star" — has an age estimate of 14.5 ± 0.8 billion years. For two decades, the astronomical community has lived with the quiet embarrassment of a star that might be older than the universe.

ISST's committed expansion history, integrated from the most recent cosmic beginning to now, gives 15.57 Gyr. Not tuned to fix the Methuselah problem — the number falls out of parameters set by supernova fitting and closure conditions. HD 140283 now sits 1.07 billion years inside the universe's age. The tension dissolves. Three independent clocks — globular cluster ages, nuclear chronometry, white dwarf cooling — all give lower bounds that ISST comfortably exceeds.

Universe age (ISST): 15.57 Gyr. Methuselah headroom: 2.04 Gyr (ΛCDM headroom: 0.26 Gyr).

ClockLower boundΛCDM headroomISST headroom
Globular clusters13.05 Gyr0.74 Gyr2.52 Gyr
HD 14028313.53 Gyr0.26 Gyr2.04 Gyr
White dwarf cooling9.4 Gyr4.4 Gyr6.2 Gyr
Show the maths

Universe age — same integral, evaluated at z = 0

Same expression as Block 1, evaluated to redshift zero:

t_0 \\;=\\; \\int_0^\\infty \\frac{dz}{(1+z)\\, H_{\\text{ISST}}(z)} \\;\\approx\\; 15.57\\ \\text{Gyr}

The 15.57 Gyr number is determined by the same expansion history that reproduces the Block 1 z = 13 number — one parameter set, two predictions. Methuselah falls inside the bound by 1.07 Gyr without anything being tuned for it.

Two minutes

Journalist path

Pick a claim card. Read the standard view, then the ISST view. You have your story in three clicks.

Twenty minutes

Physicist path

Read the mechanism. Open the engine. Toggle properties and try to break the framework. The compatibility matrix recomputes in real time.

What this isn't

Not a static paper

No other modified gravity theory ships with a tool that lets you find the combinations of properties that would contradict it. This one does. Try.

How we work

Stupid questions →

Every breakthrough started with a question that felt daft. We publish the stupid-question pipeline alongside the answers — including the failures.