Physics, rebuilt from observers that agree.
Quantum mechanics and general relativity are the two most successful theories ever written, and they contradict each other. Observer Patch Holography goes one step deeper. It starts from bounded observers, each with a partial view, and asks what the world must look like for all of those views to agree.
Live field · local repair with no global clock
Physics has two rulebooks. We want one.
Quantum theory describes the very small with probabilities and measurement. General relativity describes gravity as the shape of spacetime. Each passes every test in its own domain. Put them together inside a black hole or at the Big Bang and the mathematics breaks.
A century of attempts has tried to fix this by adding structure: extra dimensions, new particles, vibrating strings. OPH removes structure instead. It asks what the smallest system capable of having a world at all must look like, and then works out how much of known physics follows.
A fact is what survives comparison.
An observer patch is any bounded system with a local state, a boundary, a memory and a way to read its neighbours. A person, an instrument or a software process all qualify. No patch sees the whole universe.
Record
Each patch keeps local records of what it sees.
Compare
Where two patches overlap, their records are compared.
Repair
Disagreements are repaired by local moves only.
Agree
A consensus theorem guarantees that every repair order ends in the same public record. That record is the objective world.
“Reality is the stable public world reconstructed by finite, self-reading observers that compare their overlaps and repair disagreement.”
Three axioms. Zero dials.
OPH starts from three assumptions and no adjustable numbers. No axiom contains a gauge group, a particle list or a fitted constant. Everything else has to be earned.
- The screen. Every observer has a twelve-port icosahedral screen. Degree five with spherical closure forces exactly 12 vertices, 30 edges and 20 faces. A cube cannot do it.
- Agreement. Observers whose views overlap agree on shared meaning.
- Maximum randomness. Whatever the first two axioms leave open is as random as possible.
The questions OPH takes on.
Quantum gravity
A route from shared records to Lorentzian spacetime and to the Einstein field equation.
The Standard Model
A classification theorem forces the gauge structure su(3) ⊕ su(2) ⊕ u(1) from the screen's response, with three colours and an anomaly-free matter content.
Constants of nature
Constants become fixed-point problems instead of inputs. The fine-structure fixed point lands at 137.035660, within 2.5 parts per million of the measured 137.035999.
Quantum probability
Finite event algebras reproduce the Born rule and quantum updating, with the proofs checked in Lean.
Why three dimensions
Repair acts as a low-pass filter on the observer screen, and the slowest surviving block has rank exactly three.
The Yang–Mills gap
On the finite model the repair gap equals the transfer-Hamiltonian gap. The continuum construction is work in progress.
What the mathematics delivers.
A formal foundation
The core mathematics is checked by machine down to the proof kernel.
A unique resting state
All 1,352,078 states of the twelve-port screen were checked. The repair law leaves exactly one place to come to rest.
Matter by elimination
Every candidate matter content was tested. Exactly two survive, they are mirror images, and fermion statistics come out as an output.
Forces from consistency
A classification theorem forces the Lie type of the Standard Model from the screen's reversible response.
The fine-structure constant
A certified fixed point with no fitted inputs lands within 2.5 parts per million of the measured value.
Consensus at scale
In simulation, about 65,000 observer patches reach one shared record using only their local neighbours.
The papers classify each result by type: exact finite theorems, results conditional on named premises, and comparisons with measurement. Physical identification steps that are work in progress are listed as open problems in the public repository.
How to kill this theory.
A theory that cannot lose cannot win. OPH freezes its predictions before the data arrives, and the first frozen set is time-stamped on the Bitcoin blockchain. Any of these observations would break it.
- A fourth light generation of chiral matter.
- A number of quark colours other than three.
- An electric charge outside the derived charge lattice.
- An additional elementary Higgs boson.
- A tau lepton mass measured outside 1776.968991 to 1776.969063 MeV, the window fixed by the theory's lepton balance premise.
- Direction-dependent light propagation at five standard deviations, where OPH predicts exact ratios.
Every unification became technology.
Maxwell's unification of electricity and magnetism gave us radio. Quantum mechanics gave us the transistor and the laser. General relativity keeps satellite navigation accurate. A theory that joins quantum mechanics and gravity is the next entry on that list, and we intend to build on it.
Machine learning
The patch-net mathematics behind OPH powers Cadence, our brain-like learning system.
Explore Cadence →Computation
Consensus repair is a model of physical computation. A photonic proof-of-work design and a blinded self-repair experiment on IBM quantum hardware explore it.
Materials
Superconductors, magnets and quantum Hall states are collective orders that emerge from local agreement. OPH's repair mathematics is built for that kind of emergence, which makes materials design a natural target.
Propulsion
If gravity and inertia follow from deeper principles, they could become design parameters. Propulsion that engages spacetime directly is the long-range goal of this line of work.
Pick your depth.
Finite Observer Consensus as a Reconstruction Principle
The flagship paper: normal forms, the Standard Model Lie type and a route to the Einstein field equation.
Read the preprint → BookReverse Engineering Reality
The whole argument for general readers, with no mathematics required.
Read the book → TextbooksLearn OPH
Guided derivations, diagrams and reading paths for readers with a physics or computer science background.
Open the library → Repository · GitHubCollaborate on the theory
Papers, TeX sources, Lean proofs, executable derivations and evidence packages. Every open problem is an issue you can pick up.
Open the repository → PapersThe research library
Seventeen papers with first-party HTML and PDF editions, from the foundations to the particle spectrum.
Browse the papers → Lab & simulationRun it yourself
Interactive experiments with records, overlap and repair, plus a mini-universe that runs in the browser.
Enter the lab →The theory is open. Help close it.
The repository welcomes contributions from physicists, mathematicians and Lean developers. Find an open problem, send a proof, or try to break a result.