FMA as a Structural Unification Program for Physics
Abstract
This paper proposes the Functional Model of Adaptation (FMA) as a second-order unification model for physics. A first-order unification model attempts to unify the fundamental interactions by positing a common underlying ontology; a second-order unification model constrains the space of admissible physical theories by specifying a typed modeling form within which first-order models may be stated, compared, composed, and rejected without semantic collapse. The central claim is a structural unification hypothesis: there are enough degrees of freedom in the fundamental interactions to unify those interactions and address major open problems in physics, if one models fundamental interactions as operators on P-space and awareness/registration as operators on A(R)-space, with any candidate model of physics specifying the permissible algebra on these operator families. We present: (i) a narrative orientation preventing category errors, (ii) a typed specification (v0.2) functioning as a corpus-level drift-checker, (iii) the Unified Coherence Constraint Diagnostic (UCCD) Protocol for rigorous theory testing, and (iv) the Conceptual Particle Collider (CPC) as infrastructure for testing high-energy physics through second-order evidence accumulation. We prove that second-order evidence converges asymptotically to the same observational equivalence class as infinite first-order evidence, establishing that the CPC provides equivalent discriminatory power without experimental intervention at inaccessible energy scales.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Scientific Computing and Data Management
International Science and Diplomacy
Logic
programming
and type systems
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
- Publication date
- 5 January 2026
- Document type
- Preprint