One of the great puzzles of nature is how a universe that began with relatively simple ingredients, principally hydrogen and helium, has produced such extraordinary complexity. Over billions of years, matter has assembled into stars, planets, complex molecules, living organisms and ultimately the human brain. Yet the second law of thermodynamics tells us that the universe tends towards increasing entropy. How, then, does nature repeatedly build increasingly sophisticated structures without somehow anticipating their future usefulness? This new VERSF paper explores a possible answer: complexity may emerge naturally from aggregation, driven by the influence of previously committed physical events.
In VERSF, every completed event leaves an irreversible record, and Fact Momentum describes how the consequences of past events may influence subsequent physical processes. The paper investigates whether these influences can create attractive interactions that encourage matter to come together. Crucially, it also examines how preserving existing records might prevent everything from collapsing into one undifferentiated mass. The mathematics reveals how attraction and resistance to excessive overlap can balance, allowing stable structures to form without nature requiring any foresight or built-in preference for complexity.
Aggregation matters because it is one of the fundamental ways nature creates new possibilities. Individual particles form atoms, atoms combine into molecules, molecules participate in increasingly elaborate chemical systems, and organised collections of cells eventually produce living organisms. At each level, interactions between simpler components can give rise to properties that the individual components do not possess. But aggregation alone is insufficient: a pile of sand is an aggregate, while a brain is an extraordinarily organised network. For complexity to accumulate, structures must not only form but also remain sufficiently stable to interact and build upon one another.
The paper takes an important mathematical step towards explaining how this might happen. It establishes conditions under which the proposed interactions can support not just bound pairs but arbitrarily large collections without uncontrolled thermodynamic collapse. Computer calculations examine aggregates containing up to 96 constituents. Particularly interesting are the experiments involving two smaller aggregates: when their records remain adjustable, the tested clusters merge and lose their individual identities; when their records are locked, they can associate while retaining their internal structures. This suggests a possible mechanism for hierarchical organisation — stable structures becoming the building blocks of larger structures, with irreversible history helping to preserve what has already formed.
The research also has implications for VERSF’s ongoing derivation of the Standard Model of particle physics. That programme seeks to explain how the familiar strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions emerge from VERSF’s underlying dynamics, including why the forces have their particular strengths. The aggregation paper develops the mathematics of how record and field responses combine, and how allowing internal variables to adjust — or preventing them from doing so — changes their effective interactions. Importantly, the same mathematical structure already appears in VERSF’s calculations involving physical currents, record preservation and gauge fields. This provides a potentially useful connection between the mechanisms responsible for stable aggregation and those being investigated to derive the fundamental forces.
The paper does not yet calculate the measured strengths of the Standard Model forces, nor does it establish that the proposed aggregation mechanism follows uniquely from VERSF’s complete physical equations. Those remain important tests. What it does establish is a more precise mathematical framework for investigating how attraction, irreversible records and physical stability might work together. It also helps identify what must be calculated next to connect these processes to the full gauge interactions of particle physics.
The broader possibility is compelling: perhaps nature does not favour complexity directly at all. Perhaps the universe simply permits matter to aggregate, while the lasting consequences of previous events help preserve those structures and influence what can happen next. Given sufficient energy flows, interactions and opportunities for further organisation, complexity could then emerge progressively, without any need for nature to know where the process is heading. If that principle can ultimately be derived from VERSF’s fundamental dynamics, it could help explain not only how matter interacts, but also how a universe governed by irreversible physical laws became capable of producing such remarkable organisation.