What if time doesn’t flow the way we think it does?
What if the ticking of every clock — from the heartbeat of a star to the trembling of a proton — is actually powered by the same underlying mechanism? In this latest work, we explore an idea that rewires our understanding of physics from the ground up: the universe updates itself in discrete ticks, and the amount of change that happens in each tick — what we call change-density — is the hidden engine behind everything.
This idea does something that physics has struggled with for over a century: it unifies the big and the small using a single principle. Gravity, instead of literally slowing time, turns out to simply modulate how much change happens per tick. And deep inside protons, the same change-density rules force the particle to build itself out of 17 concentric information shells — not because of chance or preference, but because mathematics and information conservation leave it no other choice.
The result is a surprising, elegant picture: the same thing that makes time run slower near black holes also sculpts the internal architecture of matter itself. The macro and the micro — gravitational time dilation and baryon structure — are two different faces of one underlying phenomenon. In this framework, time becomes the way the universe keeps track of accumulated change, while the structure of matter reflects how that change must balance itself to remain stable.
Perhaps the most exciting part is that this isn’t just philosophical speculation. The framework makes falsifiable predictions — including a 17-shell pattern inside the proton that future high-precision scattering experiments can confirm or refute. If these predictions hold, it would represent a profoundly new layer beneath both General Relativity and Quantum Chromodynamics. And if they don’t, then the idea has done what any good theory should: it put its claims on the line.
For now, what matters is this: we may have found a simple, powerful principle — change-density — that didn’t just guide the birth of the universe, but quietly shapes everything inside it.