Causal Update Cosmology (CUC): Series Overview and Roadmap

Description This document provides the official overview and roadmap of the Causal Update Cosmology (CUC) research program. Causal Update Cosmology is a theoretical framework that investigates how temporal structure, irreversibility, regime formation, and effective physical descriptions can emerge from minimal causal-update principles, without presupposing physical time, spacetime geometry, energy, or thermodynamic laws. The overview summarizes the complete structure of the CUC series and clarifies the role of each installment.The core theory, consisting of CUC I–IX, establishes the causal update framework, demonstrates the emergence of a three-regime structure (initial, central, terminal), and formulates the general existence conditions for systems admitting a central regime. With CUC IX, the foundational theoretical framework is considered complete. Building on this closed core theory, a set of derivative and interpretive papers analyzes regime-local structural inevitabilities without modifying or extending the underlying axioms. These include: The Four Gates, which provides operational criteria for identifying central-regime–admitting systems, an inevitability analysis of quantum theory below the central regime, an inevitability analysis of special relativity in spatially uniform central-regime systems, and an inevitability analysis of gravitation (general relativity) in spatially inhomogeneous central-regime systems. Together, these works establish that quantum theory, special relativity, and gravitation are not independently postulated frameworks, but structurally inevitable descriptive regimes that emerge under different conditions within the same causal update structure. This overview reflects the current state of the CUC program, in which the inevitability analyses are complete up to general relativity. The remaining open direction concerns the origin of a maximal causal propagation speed and its interpretation as a bound on information processing, to be addressed in future work without revising the completed foundations of CUC.