The Carrollian Initial State Cosmology

The eighth and closing volume of the αLGQV programme goes back to what comes before matter, geometry and time. In the counter-rotating elliptic model the universe begins as RP³, filled with a quark-gluon-vacuum conglomerate at about five times nuclear density and rotating at the speed of light, so that time does not flow. Part I reproduces unchanged the paper The Carrollian beginning of a counter-rotating elliptic universe (doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.32912.98561). It shows that this state is a Carrollian manifold and derives what follows from it: two integers carried by the beginning, the absence of a first instant, an irreversible onset with two arrows of time, baryons surviving incomplete annihilation, and the end of the Carrollian epoch at confinement.

Part II asks what the initial state is. Its answer is energy before it has any form. Matter is actualized energy, and the vacuum is the energy that did not actualize. The vacuum is a Maxwell viscoelastic medium, and gravitation is its response to the contrast that actualized energy makes. Part III closes the open problems one by one. It derives the field equations of the beginning, shows that only a quarter of the initial energy is released at confinement (T ≈ 110-126 MeV, below the QCD crossover), and bounds the curvature at Ω_K ≤ 0.0031. It then writes the whole model as one action. In that action Newton's coupling depends on the chiral condensate, G_eff = G(σ/f_π)^. This explains why gravitation is absent at the beginning, and it turns the handover into the switch-on of gravitation as the condensate forms. The same Part states openly that the model does not generate the primordial spectral index.

Part IV places the volume in the programme. It shows which inputs of Volumes I-VII the initial state turns into consequences:

• the form of the vacuum-matter coupling α_V ≈ 0.005 (Vol. I);
• finite-density cores in place of singularities (Vol. II);
• the attribution swap of ICAST, read on the pencil y = (R₀ + ict)·x (Vol. IV);
• closure, persistence and differentiation (Vols. V-VII).

It also states which inputs remain measured.

The volume ends with an observational manifesto: twenty refutable statements set against ΛCDM, inflation and MOND. The sharpest are:

• a tensor-to-scalar ratio r ≈ 0;
• no phantom crossing, w ≥ −1;
• a gravitational-wave luminosity distance exceeding the electromagnetic one by 1.35-1.40 at z = 0.5, the same at every frequency;
• no dark-matter particle.

Every key step is set out as a fork with both branches followed, and every computable claim comes with the code that checks it.

IIIR Cosmology and Theoretical Physics, 2026; 447 pp.