Organized Vacuum Vortices: Unifying Galactic Acceleration, Cluster Lensing, and Cosmological Structure

We present the Vortex Framework (VF): a theory in which one elastic vacuum medium — the entropic-elastic vacuum of emergent gravity, organized by baryonic matter — supplies the phenomena currently attributed separately to dark matter and to modified dynamics. The medium has two phases separated by a derived activation gate. In the elastic (slaved) phase, baryons strain the vacuum and the released strain adds to gravity as g = gbar +f(y) √gbar a0 with y = p gbar/a0. A free fit of the radial acceleration relation to 175 SPARC galaxies (3,380 points) returns a0 = 1.091 × 10−10 m s−2 , within 0.2% of cH0/6 = 1.093 × 10−10 m s−2 : the acceleration constant fitted by MOND for four decades is the Hubble rate divided by six, as derived by Verlinde. We further prove an exact identity: the empirically fitted MOND interpolation function is the Planck occupation factor, f(y) = y/(e y − 1) — the Newtonian regime is mode freeze-out, the deep-MOND regime is equipartition — and the observed scale-independence of the relation forces a per-mode bath temperature kBT(k) = ℏ √ a0k, excluding every single-temperature bath including Gibbons–Hawking. The resulting law has zero adjusted constants and matches fitted MOND to within one percentage point of median velocity error; a second, independently derived global gate brings the predicted baryonic Tully–Fisher normalization to within 0.2% (median) of the measured value (paired ratio 1.025 ± 0.066; statistically limited). In the condensed phase, organized structure carries a fixed gravitational enhancement κ = 6.5345, derived from hexagonal vortex packing and the Rankine–Hugoniot maximum compression ratio and equal to Ωm/Ωb within 2%; relaxedcluster mass-to-baryon ratios (6.4–7.7) bracket it. Deuterium counting excludes a baryonic rest-mass reading of κ at 343σ and causality excludes a pressure reading; the condensed phase is therefore specified as a topological-defect condensate of the medium — pressureless, collisionless, gravitationally transported, baryon-nucleated — and we derive a no-go theorem showing that all relaxational (slaved) alternatives fail the CMB acoustic requirements in a two-sided pincer that inertial defect dynamics evade by construction. The background cosmology H2 = H0 2 [Ωr(1 + z) 4 + κΩb(1 + z) 3 + ΩΛ] passes Big Bang nucleosynthesis and matches matter–radiation equality, the sound horizon, and the cosmic age at the few-percent level or better. Run through a standard Boltzmann code at these derived densities — with no dark-sector parameter adjusted — the framework reproduces the acoustic peak positions to 0.5%, their heights to 1.6%, the first E-mode polarization peak exactly, and the TE zerocrossings to within one multipole. The same inability to tune produces the framework’s sharpest liability, which we report rather than defer: it predicts S8 = 0.858, roughly 3σ from joint weak-lensing constraints and a sharper version of a tension ΛCDM already carries, which it cannot evade because its matter density is an output of κ. Throughout, verdicts were preregistered before data contact; we document every negative result and kill — including the 1circumgalactic-density falsification of the framework’s own earlier floor mechanism and a null test of lensing-mass dependence on cluster merger violence — and name the open debts, foremost the defect energy-per-baryon constant underlying κ. All notebooks, code, and data provenance are provided for full reproducibility.