General relativity’s treatment of black holes leaves three classical puzzles where the theory’s mathematical structure outpaces its operational interpretation: the curvature divergence at r = 0 (“outside the theory” by GR’s own admission), the frozen-star / “nothing crosses” paradox (asymptotic freezing in Schwarzschild exterior coordinates and smooth crossing in Kruskal–Szekeres coordinates simultaneously), and the time-space coordinate inversion inside the horizon (where t becomes spacelike, r timelike, and “approaching r = 0 is inevitable” becomes a temporal claim with no clear physical mechanism). To these we add two dynamical questions that current observations make sharp: how the boundary layer responds when matter actually arrives at the horizon, and what is physically happening during the binary black-hole mergers that LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA have catalogued by the dozens since 2015. This paper develops these puzzles and questions within the (3+3) spacetime framework of 1 and the 6D Lagrangian paper 2, using two conceptual moves: the substrate/excitation distinction (foam cells in activated/dormant/ready states, versus matter as KK n ≥ 1 mode excitations propagating on activated cells) and the photon-only inter-cell relay of 4 §3 (cross-cell communication requires the photon-relay substrate to be activated). With these moves, the classical puzzles dissolve operationally. The GR singularity at r = 0 is replaced by a finite region of ready-state foam at the framework’s minimum scale: cells at R₃ = LP with KK n ≥ 1 modes collapsed to the n = 0 condensate, information stored topologically rather than dynamically (1 §21. 4) ; there is no infinity anywhere in the framework’s description of a BH. Information is preserved unitarily through per-cell topological winding w on dormant cells — the same π₂ (S²) = ℤ mechanism that gives proton stability and baryon-number conservation, not a separate mechanism added to handle BHs. The frozen-star vs. smooth-crossing tension is dissolved by c-budget reallocation: as r → rS, vT → 0 while vₜ₃ → c, with both observations correct simultaneously because they refer to different components of the same c-budget identity. The BH interior has a structurally rich three-time-dimension structure, drawn from 2 §14bis. 41: T frozen at the horizon (standard gravitational time dilation), t₂ severed (BHs disconnected from cosmic Hubble flow, frozen at their formation epoch as cosmic fossils), t₃ continuing per-cell (internal Compton cycling and topological dynamics persist even though no inter-cell propagation is possible). Mass inside decomposes into three independently-preserved carriers: baryon mass (topological winding n = 918 per proton, conserved at any density) ; rest-mass Compton cycling (t₃-dynamical, continues at full rate inside) ; gravitational field (geometric, communicated outward via slot-occupation-density gradient through external foam tiles). Hawking radiation operates in two regimes — photon-only relay for cold BHs (essentially all astrophysical), fermionic keeper-wave bifurcation w = 1/2 → +1/2, −1/2 producing electron-positron pairs for hot BHs (primordial at late-stage evaporation) — both reproducing the standard TBH = ℏc³/ (8πGMkB) from boundary-layer cell-counting statistics, without invoking QFT in curved spacetime. For binary mergers, the substrate-level picture has two dormancy zones inspiral, fuse, and ring down, with gravitational-wave emission as foam deformation modes (the spin-2 KK mode of §2. 6. 2) and energy budget set by elastic-strain release. The (3+3) → GR reduction (1 §21. 7, 2 §3) recovers all current LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA merger waveforms — the right kind of agreement for a more fundamental theory containing GR as a limit. Distinguishing signatures (discrete KK ringdown modes, late-stage primordial-BH evaporation features, the w (z) crossing at z = 0. 223) appear at next-generation detector precision. The framework’s deepest unifying claim: the same substrate primitives (R₃, Higgs/Coleman-Weinberg, t₂, cosmic angle θ) that govern BH boundary-layer dynamics also govern the cosmological-constant sector. The structural cancellation Λgeo + ΛHiggs = 0 (from the same Coleman-Weinberg minimum that fixes Ncrit = 6, 203) dissolves the 10¹⁹⁸ “worst fine-tuning problem in physics” — Λ in (3+3) is geometric curvature plus a kinematic residual, not vacuum energy of a matter field; the QFT comparison was between unrelated quantities. The residual Λₑff = 3 Hᵢnt² sin² (2θ) / c² ≈ 6. 3 × 10⁻⁵³ m⁻² lies within a factor of 1. 73 of the observed value (compared with the 10¹⁹⁸ standard-model discrepancy). The substrate-level unity between BH and cosmological sectors is structural, not engineered — both arise from the same primitives in a framework with zero free parameters.
C. R. (René) de Haan (Thu,) studied this question.