The Still Core

RSI requires that the Eternal Consonance never be used up. To keep the field in balance, the theory identifies two resolution zones that manage the life cycle of matter and momentum. The first is the Still Core, at the center.

At the Still Core, the field's porosity reaches zero. Incoming matter from the Inhale becomes so crowded that individual toroidal knots can no longer keep spinning against the baseline potential. The knots unzip. Each returns its stored displacement energy to the field as pure, non-dissonant vibration.

As the knots unzip, they return their tension to the medium, and the medium circulates back toward the center to close the toroidal loop. In RSI this return is the Universal Inhale, which RSI proposes to underlie the large-scale bulk flows of galaxies. The process cleans the field of dissonance and returns the energy of matter to the medium, ready for the rising side that follows the next trough of the medium's breathing, the next Big Break. The universe thus runs as a self-sustaining Steady-State Oscillator rather than drifting toward heat death.

RSI also treats the Still Core as the engine that drives the circuit. The energy released by unzipping knots leaves the core as an outward jet, the source of the Exhale, and this is where the medium's pressure is chiefly pushed back up, with smaller local rises at the jets of galactic black holes. Pressure has a single value at each point, so it cannot fall all the way around a closed loop unless something raises it again, and the engine is what does. Because the medium is incompressible, a change in the engine's output is felt across the whole circuit at once, so it sets the pressure slopes everywhere in the toroid. Over a full cycle, the energy released at the core must balance the energy taken up in forming new knots along the Exhale. That is why creation and destruction of matter must stay in balance for the universe to persist. At any moment the balance can tip one way or the other, and RSI proposes that at present the engine is ahead: knots unzip at the core faster than new ones form, and the surplus energy speeds the circulation up. The engine's output depends on how fast matter reaches the core and unzips, together with the smaller engines at the centers of galaxies, so it rises and falls as the supply of infalling matter changes over the eons. RSI proposes that matter arrives in large clumps, gathered by large-scale patterns of tension in the medium, so the engine flares and then falls quiet in episodes. In a frictionless medium a circulation that is already moving needs nothing to keep it going, just as a planet needs no push to stay in orbit, so the engine is needed only to change the flow. Energy in the closed toroid is never created or destroyed: while the circulation speeds up, the energy stored in matter, light and the field's tension together falls by the same amount, and while new knots form faster than old ones unzip, the circulation slows unless another store makes up the difference. Conservation guarantees the energy is there; it does not by itself show that it is converted fast enough, and RSI must still show that by relating the rate at which matter reaches the core to the directional share of the cosmic acceleration and to the bulk flows.

The engine works within a larger rhythm. The medium's own breathing, the slow tightening and slackening of its folds over the cycle that sets the size and rhythm of every knot (Chapter VI), is primary. The energy of matter is too small a share of the universe to drive it, and the Still Core and the black holes at the centers of galaxies are smaller engines within it. RSI proposes that they also act as its pacemaker. A human heart is timed by a small cluster of pacemaker cells, far too small to pump the blood but enough to set every beat; in the same way, the matter crushed into the Still Core and into black holes may trigger the turn of the cycle without supplying its energy. How packing matter into these cores could trigger the turn, and whether the turn's timing depends on how much matter has gathered in black holes and how fast matter reaches the Still Core, are open questions. The trough of that breathing is the turn of the cycle, the Big Break, which standard cosmology calls the Big Bang.