1.1 The Silent Majority: Why Is 27% of the Universe’s Mass Invisible?

If we view the universe as a thinking brain, then those glowing stars, galaxies, and thermal radiation are merely the flickering conscious thoughts within this brain. Though brilliant, they occupy only a tiny fraction.

Beneath this luminous surface lies a vast, silent shadow. It emits no light, reflects nothing, converses with no electromagnetic waves, yet dominates the gravitational structure of the universe with its overwhelming mass. This is “Dark Matter”.

In this chapter, we will no longer treat dark matter as a particle awaiting discovery, but rather as an inevitable “information state” in the QCA computational network. We will reveal that it is the universe’s “Subconscious”—it does not participate in explicit communication (photon exchange), yet determines the fate of the visible world through its deep architecture.

Vera Rubin’s Confusion

The story begins in the 1970s. Astronomer Vera Rubin, observing the Andromeda Galaxy, discovered something bizarre that violated Newton’s laws.

According to Kepler’s laws, stars farther from the galactic center should orbit more slowly (just as Pluto at the edge of the solar system moves much slower than Mercury). However, Rubin was astonished to find that stars at the galaxy’s edge moved as fast as, or even faster than, those at the center. Based on calculations of gravity from visible matter (stars and gas), these edge stars should have long been flung out of the galaxy into the void.

Unless there was something else there.

There must be vast amounts of invisible matter enveloping the galaxy, providing additional gravitational glue to hold these stars. Calculations show that this invisible substance has 5 to 6 times the mass of visible matter.

Over the following decades, from gravitational lensing to power spectrum analysis of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), countless independent pieces of evidence pointed to the same conclusion: familiar atomic matter (baryons) accounts for only 5% of the universe’s total energy density, while “Dark Matter” occupies 27% (the rest is dark energy).

A Dead End for Particle Physics?

Facing this mystery, physicists’ first reaction was: “It must be a new particle.”

The Standard Model was immediately extended, and theorists proposed candidates like “Weakly Interacting Massive Particles” (WIMPs) and axions. To capture them, humans built massive xenon detectors in deep underground mines, launched high-energy particle detection satellites into space, and even hoped the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) would produce them.

Yet half a century has passed. Detectors remain silent. We have not captured a single dark matter particle.

This forces us to reflect: Perhaps we are going in the wrong direction? Perhaps dark matter is not a “particle” at all, or at least not the kind of marble-like entity we understand?

QCA Perspective: Mass as Background Process

In our “Quantum Cellular Automaton” (QCA) ontology, so-called “particles” are not little balls running down the street, but “Topological Knots” on discrete lattice networks.

Recalling our definitions from the second book, First Principles:

1. Mass: Arises from “self-referential loops” of information ($v_{int}>0$). As long as an information packet has non-trivial winding numbers in momentum space, it has mass.

2. Interaction: Arises from coupling between information packets and “link variables” (gauge fields). Only when a node carries a specific phase “charge” can it emit or receive photons (be seen).

This leads to a logical possibility: Could there exist a topological knot that has mass (internal dead loops) but completely lacks a “communication interface” (carries no charge)?

In computer science, this is extremely common. Think of “Background Processes” or “Daemons” in your computer.

• They consume CPU and memory (have physical weight/mass).

• They output no images to the screen, nor respond to keyboard input (transparent to photons/electromagnetic fields).

• You cannot sense their existence unless you notice the computer slowing down (spacetime curvature/gravitational effects).

We propose: Dark matter is the “background process” in the cosmic computer.

It consists of vast numbers of self-sufficient information islands in the QCA network. They continuously compute (generate gravity) but refuse to exchange data with our explicit world (Standard Model particles) (emit no light).

This is not some exotic new substance; it is the norm in computational systems. In a randomly generated complex network, nodes with “input-output interfaces” (visible matter) are often the minority, while nodes performing closed computations (dark matter) are “The Silent Majority”.

It is precisely these silent majority that form the skeleton of the universe. Without their gravitational pull, primordial gas clouds could not collapse into galaxies, stars could not ignite, and we could never have been born.

The universe’s subconscious (dark matter), though invisible, supports the stage on which consciousness (the visible world) performs.