The largest scale is the universe's own history: how it could begin or end. Physics finds one place (the center of a black hole, and the matching moment of total cosmic collapse) where its best theories break down and report a 'singularity.' The section argues that one part of the puzzle can be settled without waiting for a better theory: the universe cannot occupy a stable state in which Space has been permanently squeezed out of existence, because Spatiality is one of Nature's necessary Conditions. This rules out a zero-extension terminus. It does not by itself prove that an event follows every event, that a bounce occurs, or that cosmic history forms a cycle. Those are further physical proposals constrained by the modal result rather than entailed by it. The same closure also means that Time does not begin *from* non-Time, since there is no 'before' or 'outside' Temporality for such an origin to occupy; whether the temporal order has a least member remains a separate question.

What that breakdown reports is precise. At what physicists call the singularity, the equations report that curvature becomes infinite, that geodesics (the paths matter and light follow through spacetime) terminate, and that the theory openly declares its own incompleteness (Stephen W. Hawking, Roger Penrose, 1970): the singularity theorems establish that under broad classical-energy assumptions, General Relativity itself predicts the existence of points at which its own geodesic structure cannot be continued. The machinery that tracks every other gravitational phenomenon breaks down at this one spot. Whether the singularity is a real terminal state of Nature (a region of permanent zero extension) or only an artifact of the current classical description, to be dissolved by a deeper theory, is one of the open questions of contemporary physics.

The argument from §2 (that anything capable of hosting events at all must have Temporality, Spatiality, and Physicality as necessary features) already rules out one of the two possibilities. Whatever physics eventually discovers about the interior of a black hole or the moment of cosmological collapse, the outcome cannot be a stable state in which Spatiality has been permanently eliminated. The claim is modal rather than mechanistic: it follows from what Spatiality has to be, not from any particular physical law.

> [!corollary]
> **Singularity Preclusion** · **R17** · *Result of T6*
>
> No stable zero-extension state is a state Nature can occupy. ¬◇(permanent ¬S) at cosmological scale. The result is immediate from T6 ([§2.8.5](<2.8.5 Necessity of Nature.md>)): the Necessity of Nature gives □(T∧S∧Φ), hence □S, hence ¬◇(permanent ¬S). Equivalently, in the Null State idiom: a region in which Spatiality is permanently eliminated is, by the Triconditional Cross-Entailment of the Conditions (¬S → ¬T∧¬Φ; [§2.6.7](<2.6.7 Triconditional Cross-Entailment.md>)), one in which the joint negation of T, S, and Φ obtains, so under the Null State definition ([§2.7.1](<2.7.1 Null State (∅).md>)) such a region is ∅, and ¬◇∅ by T6. The claim is strictly modal: it holds independently of which specific physics describes the approach to compression.

*The singularity-resolution constraint.* A complete theory must not represent the classical singularity as a stable state in which Time, Space, or Substance has ceased to obtain. It may instead treat the singularity as a boundary of the classical description or replace it with a configuration that continues to realize the three Conditions. That result does not by itself establish an actual successor after every moment. What is structural is narrower: Nature cannot occupy a stable zero-extension state, change never becomes impossible, and the Conditions cannot originate by switching on from their prior absence. An actual continuation through a would-be cosmological boundary requires an additional premise that physical change continues to occur there. Given that premise, a bounce is one candidate realization; given further premises about recurrence and transmitted macroconditions, a cycle is another. Those are abductive physical models constrained by the modal result, not strict entailments of the proof.

*Temporal closure.* The three-beat sequence from Modal Constitution through Cartesian Certainty (§[§2.1.3](<2.1.3 Modal Constitution.md>), 2.2) closes on a result that returns here at cosmological scale: Time does not come into being from a prior absence of Time. This is not yet the claim that the temporal order has no least member or contains an actually infinite past sequence. Imagine a state in which nothing ever changes: no events, no becoming, no difference across time. That would itself be a state, and it would be a different state from the one we are in now, where change is under way. But being in one state rather than another is itself a difference, and difference is exactly what change tracks. *No change* is not a coherent alternative condition Nature could have occupied before change got going. There is no coherent prior state from which a first change departed, and so nothing "before" or "outside" Temporality at all. Temporality, which is what change measures, is therefore structurally closed. The past is eternal in that structural sense. This does not settle the temporal order's bare order-type: it neither proves a past-unbounded sequence of events nor excludes a least moment that has nothing before it. Those are cosmological and order-theoretic questions, not consequences of structural closure.

*Interval and structure.* The oldest form of the question asks whether the series of moments has a first member (a moment with none before it) and treats that as the question of whether time began. The question carries a picture, and the picture is the error. Asking what came *before* the first moment treats time as a line you could stand to one side of, and that picture, not any answer to it, is the mistake. It construes Temporality as an *interval*: a manifold of instants laid out under earlier-than, whose order is then interrogated for a least element, the way one asks whether the integers have a least member. Temporality is not that. It is the structural condition, established at §[§2.3](<2.3 Necessary Possibility of Change.md>)–2.4, that to be at all is to stand in succession; the manifold of instants is represented *within* it, not a container it is laid out inside. The relation is the one Chapter 2 already fixes for modality: possible worlds are representations within the structure of Reality, never a space Reality sits inside, and “outside the space of worlds” names not a further option but a collapse in what specifying an option would mean ([§2.1](<2.1 The S5 Pipeline.md>); the same structural fact — worlds represented within Reality, not concrete relata standing alongside it — does the anti-plurality work at [§4.4.1](<4.4.1 Modal Realism.md>), and is gathered into the unicity of the totality at [§7.9](<7.9 Synthesis.md>)). The temporal manifold stands to Temporality as the space of worlds stands to Reality. The parallel is structural, not a verdict on degree of reality: it fixes only that the represented order is no container its condition sits inside, and does not turn past instants into mere possibilia. Past times are as fully obtained as the present; to call the manifold represented within Temporality places it ontologically without demoting it.

That 'fully obtained' is the tenseless B-series the account preserves as a genuine description of structural succession, not the symmetric block it rejects: the considered composition ([§7.2](<7.2 Time.md>), [§7.2.5](<7.2.5 What is Concluded.md>)) keeps the B-series while holding the arrow mind-independent and irreducible, so a block universe with a real arrow is compatible with the account and one without is not. The phrasing is that reconciled tensed-tenseless composition, not a bare B-theory on which 'the universe began to exist' would lose its sense, which is why the traversal reply that follows does real work rather than dissolving the dispute trivially.

So “what lies outside Temporality?”, and with it “what came before the first moment?”, is not a hard question the argument has left unanswered. It is the modal container fallacy one level down, and it dissolves against the same considerations.

What survives the dissolution is exact. Structural closure, □T, together with the preclusion of the Null State ([§2.7](<2.7 Nothing to Consider.md>)) and the parasitic reading of negation ([§2.1.5](<2.1.5 The S5 Bottleneck.md>)), forecloses any “before” or “outside” Temporality, since each is a domain-external negation already shown to describe no condition at all. That is what rules out a beginning.

A beginning, in the sense that has ever troubled anyone, is not the bare presence of a first moment but time *coming to be*: a passage into Temporality from a state without it; closure denies the “from without” directly. On the manifold's bare order-type (whether the instants happen to possess a least member) closure is silent, and that silence is the result, not a gap left in it. Should there be a least moment, it is a boundary with nothing on its far side, a pole rather than an edge time crosses from elsewhere, and nothing downstream turns on whether the manifold has one.[^7-6-0-singularity-order-type] The asymmetry that made the missing last moment feel free and the missing first feel hard was itself an artifact of the interval picture; the temporal structure has no ends in the only sense that matters, because it has no outside.

The boundary that remains is of another kind entirely: not an edge but the closure itself. The constraint is the boundary, bounding not by a limit Temporality arrives at but by leaving nothing beyond to arrive at.

[^7-6-0-singularity-order-type]: That the order-type question is *open* rather than meaningless is shown by its having distinct coherent answers the framework leaves standing. At the near end the series may carry a least moment with finite past, \[t₀, ∞); no least moment yet finite past duration, (t₀, ∞); or no least moment with infinite past, (−∞, ∞). The far end is open the same way: it may carry a greatest instant (a silent terminus) or none, so each end closes or stays open independently of the other. A senseless question does not come with rival coherent answers like these: the framework adjudicates none, which marks a limit of reach, not a collapse of sense. Nor does a possible least moment threaten the *necessity* of Nature's structure. “Always” divides in two. There is the atemporal sense in which □(T∧S∧Φ), the Necessity of Nature ([§2.8.5](<2.8.5 Necessity of Nature.md>)), holds without being indexed to any moment, much as a necessary truth does (the analogy reaching only that atemporality, not the abstract or stipulated character of mathematical necessity), so that a first moment, were there one, would leave it untouched. And there is the omnitemporal sense in which Nature is present at every moment there is, which a bounded interval \[t₀, ∞) satisfies in full. The structure’s necessity lives at the first level, which the order-type question cannot reach.

That neutrality is where the section earns its restraint, so it is worth saying plainly why the bare order-type is inert. The Kalām worry was never a worry about a least member as such; it was a worry about traversal and about coming-to-be: a past completed by successive addition so that the present could be reached, and a time that began to be from a prior absence of time. Structural closure meets both directly: there is no prior absence for time to emerge from, and the recurrence reading developed below refuses the single beginningless event-line the traversal objection requires. With both of its real concerns answered, the question of whether the represented order happens to carry a first instant has nothing left to bear. A least moment, were there one, would be a fact about the order and not a beginning in any sense that ever generated the difficulty; its presence or absence changes no downstream result. The silence is therefore principled rather than evasive: the apparatus settles every question that was doing work and declines only the one that, once the rest are settled, does none.

*What the closure does not settle.* It is worth being exact about what kind of result the order-type neutrality is, because a principled silence is easy to mistake for an unfinished one. What the closure delivers and what it declines face the same direction (forward) on each side, and that symmetry is the whole of the diagnosis. What is earned strictly and from the front is exact, and narrower than a flat absence of a *last* moment: to be at all is to stand in succession, so at every moment change remains *possible*, □◇C never lapses (§[§2.3](<2.3 Necessary Possibility of Change.md>)–2.4), and no changeless stretch can elapse ([§7.6.5](<7.6.5 What is Concluded.md>), where the relationalism-about-instants premise the floor turns on is shown to be supplied by the framework's own account of Temporality rather than purchased as an extra premise).

What that floor leaves open is the bare order-type at the far end, exactly as it left it open at the near one. A moment at which change remains possible but no further change ever actually occurs would individuate no successor, and so would close the series: a silent terminus, the far-future twin of the least-moment pole, as inert as it. Foreclosing *that*, unlike foreclosing a changeless stretch, takes more than □◇C: it takes actual change never permanently ceasing, the abductive premise [§7.6.5](<7.6.5 What is Concluded.md>) leans on, not the strict floor.

The strict result does not go untested, and one case tests it hardest. The far-future state physics actually projects is not the zero-extension collapse the Singularity Preclusion result forecloses but its opposite: heat death, the maximal-entropy equilibrium an expanding cosmos drifts toward. The Singularity Preclusion result is silent here: heat death is not a region of vanished Spatiality, so the Null-State line that rules out the compressive terminus does no work against the expansive one. If anything rules it out as a changeless state, the modal result must do it alone, and it does. Heat death is not a state in which change has become impossible: maximal entropy is the exhaustion of usable gradients, macroscopic stasis rather than metaphysical stillness. What it removes is the thermodynamic gradient that *reports* the temporal direction, not the direction itself, which is structural ([§1.4.1](<1.4.1 Time.md>)), a feature of Temporality, not a quantity the entropy slope confers and can later withdraw.

So ◇C holds at the heat-death moment as it holds at every moment: change never becomes *impossible* there, and that much is strictly modal (§[§2.3](<2.3 Necessary Possibility of Change.md>)–2.4). Whether a later moment actually *follows* (whether the series runs on or closes on a silent terminus) is the bare order-type question again, left open by the strict floor exactly as the least-moment question is. If actual change never permanently ceases (persistent micro-fluctuation, the premise [§7.6.5](<7.6.5 What is Concluded.md>) leans on), no moment is the last: the series runs on, and heat death is a maximal extension, not an edge time runs out at. But that last step (and with it the cyclic continuation developed below, on which the equilibrium is a phase the bounce carries over rather than a place Nature halts) rests on change continuing to *occur*, not merely remaining possible, and so belongs to the abductive layer, not the strict modal floor.

What the floor secures is exact: change never becomes impossible (□◇C), and no changeless stretch can elapse ([§7.6.5](<7.6.5 What is Concluded.md>)); the presence or absence of a bare final instant it declines, as it declines the bare first. A missing *first* moment would be the mirror demand (that every moment be *preceded*) and nothing the argument has earned points backward in that way. The one apparatus that might supply it, the production reading of explanation, on which a contingent state is accounted for by the prior state that produces it ([§4.1.3](<4.1.3 Principle of Sufficient Reason.md>)), grounds earlier to later, and is constitutively silent on a state with no earlier relatum, which is exactly what a first moment would be. So the resource that bears on the missing last moment and the apparatus that would have to secure the missing first both run forward, and neither yields a backward necessity, nor, forward, anything strong enough to foreclose a bare greatest instant, since forward-running succession delivers only □◇C, not an actual successor at every moment. The neutrality on order-type is therefore diagnosable, and symmetric at both ends: it is the precise shadow of that shared forward-facing, not a gap left waiting to be filled.

This symmetry has an independent echo in the critical literature on the Grim Reaper arguments. Schmid -(Joseph C. Schmid, 2024) constructs future-oriented Benardete paradoxes and shows them epistemically symmetric with the past-oriented ones the finitist deploys: whatever forbids an infinite past by such reasoning forbids an endless future on the same grounds, a consequence the finitist means to avoid. The present account welcomes the symmetry the finitist must resist. Its floor is already two-ended — □◇C forward at each moment, no changeless stretch elapsed — and its order-type neutrality is the same at the least-moment pole and the silent terminus. Where Schmid turns the symmetry into a reductio of the paradox-based case for a first moment, structural closure absorbs it: neither end is foreclosed by the strict result, and neither needs to be, since what a beginning ever meant was coming-to-be from without, not the bare presence or absence of a terminal instant at either pole.

This is a diagnosis of the framework’s reach, not a theorem that the manifold has no least member: it says only that whether the manifold has one is not a question the structural apparatus is built to settle, and, by the inertness just shown, not one it needs to. A closure honest about its own reach is the kind worth having.

*Space and Substance.* The closure just run for Temporality is not peculiar to Time. It is one reading of a result the proof reaches schematically across all three Conditions: Parasitic Negation ([§2.1.5](<2.1.5 The S5 Bottleneck.md>)) shows that to negate a Condition from outside itself describes no condition at all, and the schema is indifferent to which Condition fills the slot. Run it for Spatiality and the spatial form of the question dissolves the same way. "What lies beyond the edge of space?" pictures Space as a region one could stand outside of and look back into, with a further place on the far side of its boundary; but a place on the far side of Space would be a place that is nowhere in space (an extension that is no extension) and that is not a hard location the argument has failed to find, only the container fallacy one Condition over. There is no outside of Space for an edge to face, and so no edge in the sense the question needs: not a wall with a beyond, but a closure with nothing past it.

Run it for Physicality and the oldest creation-question goes the same way. "What brought Substance about from outside it?" asks for an origination of the being through some prior cause or process; but causation and production are among the very operators that presuppose Physicality in order to operate ([§1.4](<1.4 Three Conditions.md>)), and origination from sheer absence is foreclosed already, since ∅ is nowhere Nature can obtain ([§2.7](<2.7 Nothing to Consider.md>)). Substance does not come from non-substance: not because some first substance held out against a prior nothing, but because "from outside Substance" names no source.

What each reading forecloses is the "from without," and only that; on the inside structure of each Condition it stays silent, by the same discipline that kept the temporal closure off the order-type. Spatial closure rules out an edge with a far side; it says nothing about whether Space is finite or infinite in extent, and a manifold closed without boundary (the spatial counterpart of the least-moment pole) is consistent with either. Which one holds is left to physics. Substantial closure rules out substance-from-non-substance and says nothing about how much Substance there is or how it is distributed. The neutrality is again the result and not a gap in it: the argument settles the question that was doing the work (whether a Condition could come to be from a state without it) and declines the questions of extent and quantity that, once that one is settled, were never the difficulty. The three closures are one closure read three ways. Each rests on what the temporal reading rested on, the parasitic reading of negation ([§2.1.5](<2.1.5 The S5 Bottleneck.md>)) and the preclusion of ∅ ([§2.7](<2.7 Nothing to Consider.md>)), now drawing its own conjunct of the □(T∧S∧Φ) the Necessity of Nature secures: □T for the temporal reading, □S for the spatial, □Φ for the physical.

> [!corollary]
> **Triconditional Closure** · **R18** · *Result of L2, T6*
>
> The three per-Condition closures are one closure read three ways. By the Parasitic Negation Lemma ([§2.1.5](<2.1.5 The S5 Bottleneck.md>)), a negation of any Condition D ∈ {T, S, Φ} from outside D — a "before" Time, an "outside" Space, a "beyond" Substance — describes no condition at all; with the preclusion of ∅ ([§2.7](<2.7 Nothing to Consider.md>)) and the Necessity of Nature ([§2.8.5](<2.8.5 Necessity of Nature.md>)), each Condition draws its own conjunct of □(T∧S∧Φ): □T (no coming-to-be of Time from a prior absence), □S (no edge of Space with a beyond), □Φ (no Substance from non-Substance). Each reading forecloses only the "from without" and stays silent on the matching inside question — the order-type of Time, the extent of Space, the quantity of Substance.

The singularity is just the place where the temporal reading meets the physics that made its question feel urgent; the spatial and substantial readings meet that physics elsewhere (in the large-scale geometry of Space and in what conservation secures) and, as structure, are settled before physics arrives.

A figure or two before the constraint lands. The arc from the hot dense state our cosmology calls the Big Bang to the present runs about 13.8 billion years. Compressed to a single calendar year, the solar system forms in early September; multicellular life appears in mid-December; the genus *Homo* arrives in the last two hours; recorded human history fills the final ten seconds. The forward continuation (through the stelliferous era, the degenerate era, into the black-hole era) extends to something like 10^{100} years before the last evaporating remnant emits its final photon. The figures exceed intuitive registration, and that is the point. The full sweep most readers picture when they think *all of time* (beginning to evaporative end) is one cycle, finite at both ends. Temporal closure is the condition; a cycle is one conditional model of what may play out within it.

*If the resolution is cyclic: past-unbounded recurrence, not a completed past-infinite totality.* The past is eternal in the structural sense established above: nothing lies before or outside Temporality, so the bang cannot be an absolute beginning. That is a claim about the *closure* of Temporality, not the arithmetical claim that an actual Cantorian infinity of past events is instantiated in concrete reality as a completed totality. The two are not the same on the standard literature (William Lane Craig, 1979); (William Lane Craig and James D. Sinclair, 2009), and the difference matters. On the cyclic reading developed above, each cycle is finite in duration at both ends; what is past-unbounded is the recurrence of the pattern T, S, Φ across cycles, not the duration of any one cycle, and no single completed infinite collection of events obtains as a totality. What the proof reaches at §[§2.3](<2.3 Necessary Possibility of Change.md>)–2.4 is the structural closure of Temporality; the past-unbounded *recurrence of cycles* is the abductive cosmological picture built on it, not a completed past-infinite set of events.

*Hilbert's Hotel and traversal.* The distinction answers two standing Kalām objections. The contemporary defender of finite-past cosmological arguments, Craig -(William Lane Craig, 1979); Craig and Sinclair -(William Lane Craig and James D. Sinclair, 2009) being the standard references, has pressed that an actual infinity cannot be instantiated in concrete reality: Hilbert's Hotel and the Cantorian paradoxes of completed transfinite sets generate contradictions the moment they are imported into the physical world. The objection lands against a cosmology that posits a single beginningless succession of physical events forming a completed infinite totality. It does not land against the cyclic reading. Each cycle is a finite completed succession; what runs through past-unboundedly many cycles is the modal pattern of T, S, Φ holding invariantly, not a single set of events aggregated into a completed transfinite collection. Where the defender presses that the sequence of cycles is itself an actual infinity, the reply distinguishes recurrence under invariant law from aggregation into a completed set: each cycle is fully real in its turn, but none exists as a member of a completed collection of cycles possessing a cardinality, and the modal claim is about the invariance of the law that licenses the recurrence rather than about a totality the cycles compose. Cantorian paradoxes attach to completed totalities so treated; recurrence is not completion.

Nor is the distinction minted for the occasion. It is of a piece with the cardinality finding at [§4.4.1](<4.4.1 Modal Realism.md>), where the demand for a completed totality of concreta at maximal scale is pressed against the one metaphysics that ever seriously accepted it and destabilizes on that theory’s own machinery: recombination unrestricted generates a world bigger than any world, so neither the aggregate nor the set of all worlds survives (Forrest and Armstrong -(Forrest, Peter, and D. M. Armstrong, 1984)), and the proviso that would save the count is one nothing in the theory grounds. The refusal to complete fully real members into a totality bearing a cardinality is therefore not an evasion adopted here to escape the Cantorian paradoxes; it is a refusal the framework has already paid for at [§4.4.1](<4.4.1 Modal Realism.md>), where the count was the opponent’s requirement rather than its own.

The second philosophical Kalām argument, that the temporal series of past events cannot be formed by successive addition; "the present moment would never have arrived" if the past is beginningless, engages the same distinction. The argument presupposes a single beginningless temporal series traversed event-by-event up to the present. The cyclic reading refuses that presupposition. Each cycle is traversed in finite time; the present is the moment it is within the cycle it is within; what is past-unbounded is the recurrence of the modal pattern, not a single beginningless event-line. There is no super-temporal vantage from which all prior cycles compose a series that had to be traversed to reach the present, and the modal structure that recurs across cycles is not itself something that gets traversed: necessity does not come to obtain. The Kalām framing requires an event-line to traverse, and the modal account does not put one on offer.

These replies do not concede the Kalām framing: they refuse its arithmetical model of past time. The cosmological dispute ([§7.6.1](<7.6.1 What is Disputed.md>)) is whether the singularity is a terminal state or a seam; the philosophical dispute is whether the past is best described as a single beginningless succession or as the past-unbounded recurrence of a finite-duration cycle. The cyclic proposal developed here takes the second as an abductive interpretation. The Necessity of Nature alone establishes structural closure and does not decide between those cosmological models.

*No origin from outside the Conditions.* Temporal closure rules out an expansion initiated by a transition from non-Time, non-Space, or non-Substance. It does not show that the particular expansion described by current cosmology has always been occurring, or that an actual prior phase must exist. Those conclusions require a physical account of the boundary and of the token-level conditions under which expansion occurs. If a theory establishes that physical evolution is extendible through that boundary, a bounce may supply the dynamical relay from compression to expansion. If it further establishes repeated contraction and sufficiently stable transmission across successive bounces, a cyclic model may follow. The modal argument excludes an origin from outside the Conditions; it does not actualize one of these physical continuations by itself.

*If the resolution is cyclic, what the model must preserve.* The structural argument does not pick out a cycle or determine how one would close. It constrains what any proposed closure must preserve. Three earlier results do the work jointly: Temporality is structurally closed, no coherent "before" or "outside" it, so no first moment could be an absolute beginning (§[§2.1.3](<2.1.3 Modal Constitution.md>), 2.2), absolute nothingness (a condition in which T, S, or Φ is permanently absent) is not anywhere Nature can obtain ([§2.7](<2.7 Nothing to Consider.md>)), and the laws governing Nature do not change across time ([§2.1.7](<2.1.7 Two Readings.md>), Modal Invariance; cf. [§7.5](<7.5 Binding of the Conditions.md>) How the Conditions Bind). Put together, these mark the endpoint of compression as structurally constrained (the same kind of boundary however the approach is made) and they fix the laws governing expansion from that endpoint as the same at every recurrence. Whether the macro-scale initial conditions transmit across the bounce identically enough to produce the same macro-scale trajectory at each pass is the further premise present physics supplies; on that abductive premise, equal initial conditions under equal laws yield equal macro-scale trajectories.

Two claims are doing work here and they carry different weights. The first (that a stable zero-extension terminus is ruled out) is strictly modal: it follows from what Spatiality has to be, independent of any present physics. The second (that each cycle retraces the same macro-scale story) is abductive: it follows given Modal Invariance plus an auxiliary premise that present physics supplies, namely that macro-scale initial conditions transmit across the bounce. A reader who grants only the first keeps a weaker but still substantial claim: a stable zero-extension terminus is precluded. Whether physical history continues through a bounce, forms a cycle, or takes some other admissible form is then a further question for physics.

Identical here means identical in law and in macro-scale initial state: not identical in every particular event. Quantum indeterminacy at the micro-scale does not have to be eliminated for the argument to go through. What is required is that the macro-scale shape of each cycle (expansion, compression, rebound) is fixed by the invariance of T, S, Φ and their laws. What counts as macro-scale (whether the seed fluctuation spectrum is included or only coarser features such as density and curvature) is for the physical theory that supplies the transmission premise to settle. Whether each cycle's stars occupy the same positions is not the claim; that each cycle has stars is.

The per-cycle low-entropy boundary condition that the macro-trajectory requires is what the philosophy-of-physics literature calls the *Past Hypothesis* (Albert -(Albert, David Z., 2000); Loewer -(Barry Loewer, 2007)). The Past Hypothesis names the philosophical commitment that the macro-scale initial conditions of a thermodynamic history are themselves a load-bearing posit, not a derivable consequence of the laws alone. On the cyclic reading, what the Past Hypothesis names is what each cycle's bounce-region must deliver: a low-entropy macrostate from which the cycle's elaboration toward heat-death-as-phase can begin. Any cyclic model of the kind considered here requires that *something* deliver such a state at each recurrence; *which* physical mechanism realizes the delivery (conformal rescaling, ekpyrotic phase transition, horizon dilution, LQC bounce) is for physics to settle. The framework names the philosophical posit; physics names the realization.

On the abductive layer just named, the return is not merely to a compressed state but to the same kind of compressed state, and the expansion that follows traces the same kind of macro-trajectory. Balloons filled to the same pressure pop with the same force at the scale that defines a pop: not the same air molecules displaced, not the same fragments scattered, but the same kind of macro-event. Singularities approached under the same modal constraints (given the auxiliary transmission premise) release the same order of energy, every cycle, at that same scale. That some continuation must obtain is structural; that it takes the closed-cycle form, with each pass tracing the same macro-trajectory, is the conclusion physics supplies under that premise. Which mechanism realizes the closure is empirical.

*What is established.* The framework does not predict a bounce or cycle from modal structure alone. It establishes a constraint any complete cosmology must meet: no physical history originates from or terminates in the absence of Time, Space, or Substance. A classical singularity therefore cannot be the point at which Nature becomes the Null State. Whether its resolution is a boundary, a quantum transition, a bounce, a cycle, or another structure that preserves the three Conditions remains a question for physics. The modal argument constrains the answer without pretending to supply it.


- [7.6.1 What is Disputed](<7.6.1 What is Disputed.md>)
- [7.6.2 What is Required](<7.6.2 What is Required.md>)
- [7.6.3 What is Predicted](<7.6.3 What is Predicted.md>)
- [7.6.4 What is Confirmed](<7.6.4 What is Confirmed.md>)
- [7.6.5 What is Concluded](<7.6.5 What is Concluded.md>)


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← [7.5.5 What is Concluded](<7.5.5 What is Concluded.md>) | [7.6.1 What is Disputed](<7.6.1 What is Disputed.md>) →
