A Theory of Time, Information, and the Renewal of Existence by Kaveh Dimitri Salahi and Megan Veronica Young

A stone falls into still water, and for a moment the whole pond answers it. The rings run outward, touch the reeds, come back from the far bank, and cross one another until the surface goes quiet. Nothing on the water says a stone was ever there, and yet the pond is not the pond it was. A grandmother's way of saying a word lives on in a child who never met her. A star that burned out before the Earth was born lives on as the iron in our blood. We live inside traces; we are made of them. This paper asks whether the whole universe keeps its traces the same way, and it answers with a number that falls out of the simplest sum there is, a number with a roof over it, a bridge inside it, and a way of always coming home. The point, in seven lines 1. The rule. What happens depends on the rules, on what comes in, and on what the world already carries from before. Same system, different outcome. 2. The code. Square the counting numbers, shrink each answer to one digit, and you get 1, 4, 9, 7, 7, 9, 4, 1, then 9, forever. The first eight digits are 14977941. 3. The bridge. The 9 behaves like zero. Add 9 to any number and its digit does not move. So 1, 10, 19, 28 and 37 all stand on the same spot. The structure never changes; only the distance travelled does. 4. The roof. No number, however vast, shrinks past 9. And no square ever lands anywhere but 1, 4, 7 or 9. Everything is capped. 5. The time wave. In this theory, the code is the shape of time in our world. It goes out (1497), comes home (7941), crosses the bridge (9), and on the tenth step lands back on 1. That is why the waves of the Projected world are separated by ten years. 6. The two worlds. The Projected world has meeting points and a roof. The Singularity world has neither: its waves never cross, and it is not worn down by limits in the same way. 7. The honesty. The arithmetic is proven. The reading of it as time is the authors' theory, and this paper says plainly what it would take to test it. 1. The pond and the one rule Before asking how the universe changes, ask what stays the same while it changes. This paper calls that lasting ground the canvas. It is not a sheet hung somewhere beyond the stars. It is a name for the conditions that let anything happen at all: the space, the rules, the floor on which every event stands. A piano is a good picture of it. No song lives inside a piano, yet every song needs one, and the same keys can carry a lullaby or a storm without the piano changing between the two. What changes is the order of the notes, and the notes that came before.