Hybrid Light Cosmology: A Two-Phase Ontology of Matter, Light, and Gravity

This paper presents Hybrid Light Cosmology (formerly Chute Cosmology), a comprehensive framework proposing that the observable universe exists as one interior in a nested chain of black hole interiors—a branching structure called the Chute, extending approximately seven to ten shells deep. The framework rests on a two-medium ontology: reality consists of two immiscible substrates, spacetime (lighter, supporting electromagnetic and nuclear phenomena) and brane (heavier, providing structural boundaries), coexisting in the same volume as an emulsion—brane dispersed as droplets and filaments within a spacetime-continuous phase. The central innovation is treating all physics as interfacial mechanics in this two-medium emulsion, with mass, gravity, forces, and particle identity emerging from compositional mismatch and vortex topology. From this foundation, the paper derives a unified account of mass (as interfacial drag from compositional mismatch with the local medium), gravity (as thermodynamic sorting driven by interfacial energy minimization), dark matter (as structural phase inversion producing brane-continuous regions invisible to spacetime waves), dark energy (as cascading brane failure in a pressurized vessel), inflation (as brane expansion forming a new shell boundary), quantum uncertainty (as irreducible noise from the shimmering of dispersed brane droplets). The framework demonstrates that general relativity emerges as the macroscopic limit of compositional sorting in the two-medium emulsion, and dissolves several longstanding problems including the cosmological constant problem, the hierarchy problem, the matter–antimatter asymmetry, the graceful exit problem, and the CDM/SIDM tension in dark matter phenomenology. The framework further proposes that the quantum measurement problem—the observer problem—dissolves when measurement is understood as brane activation in a hybrid medium, unifying quantum measurement and dark matter invisibility as two manifestations of partial visibility in a two-substrate system. While primarily conceptual and awaiting rigorous mathematical formalization, the framework generates over a dozen testable predictions and identifies specific empirical connections to current observational programs including DESI, CMB anomaly analyses, and gravitational lensing surveys. The mathematical architecture includes a hybrid field Ψ(x) = (φ(x), χ(x)), a coupled Navier–Stokes–Cahn–Hilliard PDE system, a hybrid action principle, and an emergent acoustic metric from which general relativity arises as a long-wavelength limit. A central implication of the inheritance model is that the minimal survivor set—φ‑photons, χ‑photons (neutrinos), electrons, and quarks—are far older than our universe, having survived multiple cosmic generations as the only vortex‑seed topologies whose lock energies demonstrably exceed transition disruption energies; if the Chute has no first shell, they approach eternity. The framework further identifies neutrinos as χ-phase photons (brane light)—pure-phase excitations of the dark medium detected through inter-medium coupling—whose apparent mass arises from χ–φ coupling rather than intrinsic hybridity—yielding a two-light ontology in which all massive excitations are hybrid knots of φ‑phase and χ‑phase components. This paper integrates and supersedes four earlier companion publications on Zenodo.