A Discrete Information-Theoretic Model of Physics on a Space-Cell Substrate: Local Update Dynamics, Event-Based Time, Continuum Limits, and Candidate Geometric Realizations

This paper develops a discrete, information-theoretic framework in which physical reality is modeled as a lattice or relational graph of interacting “space cells,” each evolving by local update rules. The framework treats space as an active information-processing substrate rather than as a passive background. Time is modeled as an ordering of state transitions rather than as a fundamental substance. Energy is provisionally associated with event density, update rate, action flow, or structured information-processing intensity, with Planck’s constant interpreted as a conversion scale between discrete transitions, phase, and action. The paper combines formal mathematical development with a summary of toy-model probes used to test whether the framework can support the kinds of structures required of a physical theory. Mathematically, it distinguishes theorem-level consequences of local/unitary dynamics from continuum-limit derivations and from simulation-supported but still speculative model-selection branches. Finite-radius local updates imply causal cones; unitary updates preserve norm; local trace-preserving operations preserve no-signaling at the reduced-state level; split-step quantum-walk updates support Dirac-like low-momentum continuum behavior; and Schrödinger-like dynamics arise as a nonrelativistic positive-energy envelope approximation rather than as the most immediate continuum limit. The space-cell framework is organized around two candidate geometric realizations. A distortable-cell model assigns deformation, strain, connection, or topology-bearing degrees of freedom to cells and links. An alternative extrinsic χ-compression model assigns an additional internal scalar coordinate , interpreted as compression, event-density elevation, hidden displacement, or update-rate modulation. The χ option is not initially treated as a literal fourth spatial dimension; it is a parsimonious internal state variable to be compared against deformation-based models under causal, weak-field, Lorentz-like, source-specific, and false-source controls. The toy-model program summarized here tests whether local update rules can generate stable, bounded, identity-preserving informational structures that survive perturbation, scattering, false-carrier pressure, and geometry-like coupling. These simulations do not prove that nature uses space cells, but they have produced mechanism-level evidence for relational identity preservation, local reconstruction, false-carrier rejection, conservation-ledger requirements, photon-like interaction bookkeeping, and χ/deformation model-selection criteria. This paper does not claim to have derived the Standard Model, full quantum field theory, or the Einstein field equations. It presents a staged mathematical and computational research framework. The strongest current claim is that local information-processing rules can be formalized in ways that recover several necessary structural features—locality, conservation-like invariants, causal propagation, no-signaling compatibility, Dirac/Schrödinger continuum regimes, and candidate weak-field geometry equations—while toy-model branches provide constrained tests of whether those structures can support physically relevant informational excitations.