For decades, astronomers have faced an awkward fact: spiral galaxies don’t behave the way ordinary gravity predicts. Stars far from a galaxy’s centre orbit much faster than they “should” if the only mass present is what we can see—stars, gas, and dust. The standard fix is dark matter: an invisible substance that surrounds galaxies in a huge halo, adding extra gravity. It’s a powerful idea, but it comes with a persistent frustration: despite enormous effort, dark matter hasn’t been directly detected.
The VERSF programme explores a different way to look at the problem—one that starts from a deeper question: what is “gravity” actually responding to? In VERSF, what we experience as time isn’t a background river that flows automatically. Instead, it emerges from irreversible events—moments where uncertainty becomes definite. When matter undergoes an irreversible change, it produces a bit: a permanent addition to the universe’s informational record. These commitments are what build the arrow of time. And crucially, their effects are not locked inside the matter that produces them—they reshape the distinguishability structure of the surrounding space.
Now imagine a spiral galaxy. It’s a vast disk packed with stars and gas clouds, all producing these irreversible commitments. Each source “projects” its influence outward through the quantum foam—the seething microscopic texture of space. The foam doesn’t create bits on its own and doesn’t amplify anything; it’s more like air for sound: a medium that allows influence to spread locally and combine. Because galaxies are disk-shaped, something special happens: the influences from many sources overlap most strongly in the midplane. The disk geometry concentrates overlap into a thin band—almost like a two-dimensional layer embedded in three-dimensional space.
That geometric detail matters because two-dimensional physics has different long-range behaviour. In three dimensions, gravity falls off as the inverse square of distance: double the distance and the pull drops by a factor of four. But in an effectively two-dimensional layer, the influence falls off more slowly—closer to inverse distance: double the distance and the pull halves. That slower fall-off is exactly what’s needed to produce the “flat” rotation curves we observe, where orbital speeds stay roughly constant far from the centre.
The claim is testable: in disk galaxies, the extra gravitational pull we attribute to dark matter may instead be the geometric consequence of overlapping informational influence in a thin coherence band. In standard gravity language, that extra pull looks like an invisible halo. In VERSF language, it’s the gravitational shadow of overlap—an emergent effect of how irreversible commitments produced by matter reorganise the informational structure of space.
What makes this especially interesting is that it suggests new observational signatures. If the effect is tied to disk geometry, it should correlate with disk thickness and surface density—and it may leave orientation-dependent fingerprints in gravitational lensing (edge-on disks should look different from face-on). Those are the kinds of predictions that let a bold idea face the real world and either stand up—or fail fast.
If nothing else, this approach reframes the mystery in a fresh way: instead of asking what invisible substance we’re missing, it asks whether the structure of information and irreversibility in a disk galaxy can produce the gravitational behaviour we see.