Energy-Flow Cosmology and Regime-Dependent Structure Formation

ABSTRACTPapers I and II of this series established empirical regime structure in two independent datasets: (I) morphology-dependent rotation curve behavior in 175 SPARC galaxies, and (II) order-of-magnitude galaxy abundance excesses at z > 6 in JWST COSMOS-Web data. This third paper introduces Energy-Flow Cosmology (EFC) as a physical framework consistent with both findings.The core mechanism is entropy-gradient-driven energy flow, introduced through the phenomenological decomposition E_total = E_flow + E_latent. We show that this framework is consistent with: (i) the three-regime classification (FLOW, TRANSITION, LATENT) observed in galactic dynamics, where low-surface-brightness galaxies show 100% simple-model success while barred systems show ~4%; and (ii) accelerated structure formation in the early universe, where galaxy abundances exceed ΛCDM predictions by 260× at z = 8–9 and 920× at z = 10–12.The same entropy-gradient principle operates at both galactic (kpc) and cosmological (Gpc) scales: steep gradients correlate with efficient structure formation, shallow gradients with standard hierarchical assembly. This cross-scale correspondence suggests that apparent "problems" for ΛCDM may instead be signatures of regime boundaries—domains where simple models fail not because they are wrong, but because they are applied outside their validity range.The interpretation is offered as an organizing framework, not a replacement for ΛCDM. Four testable predictions are provided. No claim of model replacement or universal applicability is made.