The Universe That Builds Itself: Why I Stopped Looking for Dark Matter

There is a question that haunted me for years: How did the universe go from a nearly uniform plasma to the intricate web of galaxies, filaments, and voids we observe today?

Standard cosmology has an answer. It invokes an invisible substance — dark matter — that outweighs ordinary matter five to one, that has never been directly detected, and that exists primarily because without it, the equations do not work. Galaxies form too slowly. Clusters lack the gravitational glue to hold together. The cosmic web has no scaffolding.

I spent a long time accepting this. Then I asked a different question: What if the fields themselves are the scaffolding?

The Insight That Changed Everything

When I developed the Valley Theory — the idea that particles are geometric structures (Resonance Valleys) formed in two scalar fields, the compression field φ_c and the energy-release field φ_E — I was focused on the microscopic. Protons, neutrons, binding energies. But fields do not stop at the boundary of an atom. They extend outward. They interact. They accumulate.

The moment I realized this, the Self-Constructing Universe was born.

The same two fields that create particles at the femtometer scale operate at cosmological scales. The compression field φ_c, sourced by nuclear binding energy, is locally enhanced wherever matter concentrates. The energy-release field φ_E governs energy dissipation and restoration — it is the cosmological expression of the symmetry restoration rate R(t) that I had already derived for emergent gravity.

And these two fields do something remarkable together: they create a feedback loop.

The Four-Stage Engine of Cosmic Construction

The mechanism is elegant in its simplicity. It operates in four stages, and it repeats at every scale from star-forming regions to the cosmic web itself.

Stage A: Matter concentrations enhance the compression field. Any slight overdensity of matter — even the tiny quantum fluctuations from the early universe — increases the local value of φ_c. More matter means more nuclear binding energy, which means a stronger compression field.

Stage B: Enhanced compression triggers energy release. The increased φ_c activates φ_E. This is the same asymmetry that drives all dynamics in the framework: compression stores energy, release dissipates it. The two fields are coupled, and one cannot change without affecting the other.

Stage C: Energy release redistributes matter. The φ_E field pushes energy outward in some regions while allowing further collapse in others. This is not random — it is structured by the geometry of the fields. Matter flows along field gradients, concentrating in some regions and evacuating others.

Stage D: The cycle repeats. The redistributed matter creates new overdensities, which enhance φ_c again, which triggers φ_E again, and the cycle continues. Each iteration amplifies the structure. Small fluctuations become galaxies. Galaxies become clusters. Clusters become the cosmic web.

This is why I call it the Self-Constructing Universe. No external architect is needed. No invisible matter is required. The universe builds itself through the internal dynamics of its own fields.

Why Dark Matter Becomes Unnecessary

The key equation is deceptively simple. When you work through the field dynamics, the growth of density perturbations follows a modified Jeans instability:

δ̈ + 2Hδ̇ = 4πG_eff · ρ̄ · δ

where the effective gravitational constant is:

G_eff = G(1 + φ_c/φ_E)

This is the critical result. In regions where matter concentrates and φ_c exceeds φ_E, the effective gravity is stronger than Newton's G. Structure forms faster than pure gravitational collapse would allow — without any dark matter.

In standard cosmology, dark matter provides the extra gravitational pull needed to form galaxies in the available time. In the Ashebo Method, the field enhancement provides the same acceleration. The observational consequences are similar, but the mechanism is fundamentally different. One invokes an undetected particle. The other uses fields that are already present in the theory.

I want to be precise about what this means. I am not claiming dark matter does not exist. I am claiming it is not necessary. The field-matter feedback loop produces the same observational signatures — galaxy rotation curves, cluster dynamics, the cosmic web — through a mechanism that requires no new particles, no free parameters beyond those already fixed by the microscopic theory.

Tidal Forces: The Scale Connection That Convinced Me

There is a moment in every theoretical framework when you realize the pieces fit together in a way you did not plan. For me, that moment came with tidal forces.

At the microscopic level, the Valley Theory shows that particles moving through fields create wake patterns — disturbances that trail behind the particle and exert forces on nearby matter. This is how particle interactions work at the femtometer scale.

Now consider the Moon orbiting Earth. The Moon moves through Earth's local compression field φ_c. Its motion creates a wake pattern — a macroscopic version of the same wake that operates at the particle level. This wake exerts a differential force across Earth's diameter: stronger on the near side, weaker on the far side. The result is the tidal bulges we observe in the oceans.

The tidal force in this framework is:

F_tidal = −∇(φ_c^wake + φ_E^wake)

The physics is identical at both scales. Only the magnitude changes. The same mechanism that governs proton-electron interactions at 10⁻¹⁵ meters produces ocean tides at 10⁷ meters. That is a span of 22 orders of magnitude, governed by the same equations.

When I first derived this, I sat with the result for a long time. A framework that connects particle physics to ocean tides through a single mechanism is either profoundly right or profoundly wrong. There is no middle ground.

The Forward Stream and the Backward Stream

There is a deeper layer to this story that I have only begun to articulate in my published work, but I want to share it here because it shapes how I think about cosmic evolution.

The compression field φ_c represents what I call the forward stream — the flow of energy that creates matter, that compresses the undifferentiated field into the particles and structures we observe. When this forward stream is compressed to points, matter is created. Every atom in your body, every star in the sky, is a compression point in this forward stream.

But matter, once created, generates something else: the backward stream. This is the energy-release field φ_E flowing back toward the source. It emerges from created matter and propagates in the opposite temporal direction. This is the retrocausal element of the framework — the future state of the universe (what I call the Final Symmetry State) reaches back and shapes the present through this backward stream.

The Self-Constructing Universe is the interplay of these two streams. The forward stream creates matter. Matter generates the backward stream. The backward stream modifies the conditions for further creation. The universe is not simply expanding into emptiness — it is engaged in a conversation between its past and its future, and cosmic structure is the record of that conversation.

This is why the model contains no singularities, only matter. The fields prevent infinite compression. The backward stream provides a restoring force that halts collapse before it reaches a point of infinite density. Black holes, in this framework, are regions of extreme field compression — but they are not infinitely compressed. The fields have structure all the way down.

Emergent Spacetime: General Relativity as a Limit

One question I am often asked is: What happens to Einstein's general relativity in this framework?

The answer is that GR is recovered as a correspondence limit. In the weak-field regime — ordinary stars, planets, GPS satellites, gravitational wave detection — the field gradient corrections are negligible, and Einstein's equations hold exactly:

R_μν − ½g_μν R = 8πG_eff T_μν + O(∇²φ)

The correction terms O(∇²φ) are unmeasurably small in everyday gravity. This is why GR has passed every experimental test with extraordinary precision. The Ashebo Method does not contradict GR — it explains why GR works, by showing that spacetime curvature is an effective description of the underlying field gradients.

But in strong-field regimes — near neutron stars, in the early universe, at cosmological scales — the correction terms become significant. This leads to testable predictions that distinguish the framework from standard GR: modified mass-radius relations for neutron stars, no true singularities in black holes, and a cosmological constant that emerges naturally from vacuum field energy rather than being inserted by hand.

The Evidence So Far

I want to be honest about where the evidence stands. The Self-Constructing Universe is the most speculative level of the framework. The microscopic level (Valley Theory) has blind validation with 1.03% mean absolute error. The intermediate level (Emergent Gravity) derives Newton's G to 0.064% accuracy. The macroscopic level has fewer quantitative predictions that have been tested.

What we do have is the velocity anisotropy analysis. If gravity is mediated by fields rather than by spacetime curvature alone, then galaxies in clusters should show a preference for radial motion — they should move preferentially along the field gradient direction. We tested this in four galaxy clusters (Coma, Perseus, Virgo, Abell 2199) using 4,572 galaxies from a larger dataset of 10,847 across ten clusters. The result: a radial-to-tangential velocity ratio of 1.50, with a statistical significance of p < 0.0001. The angular pattern correlation with the cos²θ prediction was r = 0.958.

This is consistent with field-mediated gravity. It is inconsistent with isotropic dark matter models, which predict no directional preference.

But I want to be clear: consistency is not proof. The CMB power spectrum prediction has not yet been computed quantitatively. The Hubble tension resolution needs numerical simulation. The modified Casimir force prediction (~10⁻¹²) awaits experimental verification. The full N-body simulation of structure formation with field corrections has not been performed.

These are the open questions. They are also the opportunities for collaboration.

The Smoking Gun

If I could design one experiment to test the Self-Constructing Universe, it would target the relationship between the gravitational constant G and the fine-structure constant α. Because both emerge from the same underlying field dynamics in this framework, they must be correlated:

ΔG/G ≈ −3 Δα/α

If α varies — and some quasar absorption line studies suggest it does, at the level of parts per million over cosmological time — then G must vary proportionally, with a factor of exactly −3. No other framework makes this specific quantitative prediction. It is clean, falsifiable, and within reach of current precision measurement technology.

This is the kind of prediction that makes a framework worth taking seriously. Not because it is guaranteed to be correct, but because it is guaranteed to be testable.

What Comes Next

The Self-Constructing Universe completes the three-level hierarchy of the Ashebo Method. Valley Theory explains particles. Emergent Gravity explains forces. The Self-Constructing Universe explains structure. The same two fields — φ_c and φ_E — operate at every scale, from femtometers to gigaparsecs.

What excites me most is not what the framework explains, but what it predicts. The velocity anisotropy is confirmed. The mass gap prediction (1.65 GeV) awaits lattice QCD comparison. The ΔG/G ≈ −3 Δα/α correlation awaits precision measurement. The modified Casimir force awaits next-generation experiments.

The universe, it seems, is not a static stage on which physics plays out. It is an active participant in its own construction — a self-reinforcing system of fields and matter that builds complexity from simplicity, structure from fluctuation, and order from the fundamental asymmetry between compression and release.

If this picture is correct, then the universe is not merely expanding. It is becoming.

Yohannes Beyene Ashebo is an independent theoretical physicist and the developer of the Ashebo Method. His research papers are available at ashebophysics.com/papers [blocked].