GDOS: Geometric Dynamics of Open Systems

Abstract

Every system in nature is open. No real system has ever been isolated. Indeed, the very act of observation already presumes that observer and observed are coupled. Yet for three and a half centuries, the foundational theories of physics have been written as if isolation were the rule and openness an afterthought. In this paper, we develop GDOS (Geometric Dynamics of Open Systems) as the single law that any open system must obey, derived from one foundational constitution and one six-dimensional geometry alone. From this one law the textbook rules of quantum mechanics, general relativity, and quantum field theory all emerge as theorems rather than as separate assumptions; the measurement problem dissolves at the axiomatic level; and Einstein's gravity and the Standard Model become two faces of the same geometry, the way Maxwell once showed the electric and magnetic fields were two. Reading backward, the major theoretical frameworks of the twentieth century — relativity, gauge theory, strings, holography, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, black-hole physics, the Standard Model, ΛCDM — all turn out to be theorems of different subsets of the same four axioms; quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and black-hole physics are siblings of one another, born of the same axiom of openness. After all, the deeper question of science is not what the world is made of, but how what we can measure connects to what is actually there. The answer offered here is itself a geometry — the geometry of openness.