The Universe Is a Globally Connected Network: Resolving the Core Contradictions of Modern Physics with Instantaneous Connectivity

For nearly a century, modern physics has been trapped by the fundamental contradiction between its two pillars—quantum mechanics and general relativity—the former revealing nonlocality, the latter establishing local causality. This paper demonstrates that the root of this contradiction lies in a century‑old mistaken presupposition: that spacetime is the fundamental reality of the universe. We propose that the universe’s underlying layer is a globally instantaneously connected basal network; the classical spacetime we perceive is not fundamental, but an emergent phenomenon of this network at macroscopic scales. Based on this paradigm, we take “global instantaneous connectivity between any two points in the universe” as the sole first principle and rigorously derive six core conclusions: The principle of the constancy of the speed of light (demoted from a fundamental axiom of relativity to a necessary corollary of the theory); The physical nature of quantum entanglement (homologous dual-port manifestation of the same basal unit); The natural resolution of the black hole information paradox (information escapes instantaneously via the basal network); The mechanical origin of dark energy (topological maintenance energy of the network, with the equation of state w= −1 rigorously derived); The fundamental resolution of the vacuum energy catastrophe (a category error between two distinct types of energy, with the 120-order-of-magnitude numerical contradiction naturally eliminated); A unified explanation for the cosmological horizon problem and the fine-tuning of physical constants (global connectivity naturally realizes cosmic thermal equilibrium, and dynamical stability accounts for the uniformity and fine-tuning of constants). The framework yields three distinctive, quantitatively testable predictions that can be examined with current or near‑future experimental facilities. It transforms the core contradictions of modern physics from numerical fitting puzzles into intelligible geometric and topological properties. If confirmed, it would mark the most profound paradigm shift in fundamental physics since the advent of relativity and quantum mechanics.