The Emergence of a New Vision: The Unfolding Universe

Menas C. Kafatos, Robert L. Nadeau

George D. Catalano

Jing Pan

This paper proposes a conceptual framework in which classical spacetime is not fundamental but emerges from a deeper, timeless, pre-geometric domain. I refer to these two layers as Ubigger, a pre-classical domain without space, time, separability, or numerical structure, and Uclassical, the emergent layer in which classical physics operates. The transition between them occurs through an unfolding process that generates spatial extension, temporal ordering, dimensional structure, and causal relations. Within this framework, quantum superposition and entanglement reflect pre-classical unity rather than nonlocal influence, while measurement corresponds to unfolding into definite classical configurations. The same unfolding mechanism provides intuitive reinterpretations of several longstanding conceptual challenges, including the Big Bang, cosmic expansion, gravitational curvature, the measurement problem, as well as the arrow of time and the universe’s low-entropy origin.

Menas C. Kafatos, Sisir Roy, Mihai Drãgãnescu

Johanna Erdmenger, Kyoung-Bum Huh, Hyun-Sik Jeong +1 more

A central challenge in diagnosing quantum chaos is to distinguish genuine many-body scrambling from kinematic effects of the spectrum. Krylov state complexity, or spread complexity, has emerged as a powerful diagnostic, with its characteristic growth, peak, and relaxation often taken as signatures of chaos. However, previous work has shown that this criterion can give false positives: saddle-dominated integrable systems may display prominent peaks even without random-matrix level correlations. We argue, based on complementary numerical and analytical evidence, that this ambiguity can be resolved by unfolding the spectrum prior to constructing the ensuing Krylov dynamics. By removing the non-universal smooth density of states while retaining microscopic spectral correlations, unfolding suppresses spurious peaks in integrable systems while preserving the universal spectral signatures of chaotic systems. Analytically, the formulation of the Lanczos iteration in terms of orthogonal polynomials yields an exact complexity kernel with a robust near-diagonal structure whose fine-grained features reflect the underlying spectral correlations. Moreover, for the logarithmic model, unfolding can be performed exactly, mapping the spectrum to a uniform lattice and yielding an analytic spread complexity that removes the false-positive peak. These findings establish unfolded Krylov complexity as a more reliable probe of genuine many-body scrambling.