We built a tiny universe with simple rules and measured what it can do. This is the record.
For three centuries, the map has been a container full of objects. Empty space as a stage; particles as little things sitting on it; forces as invisible ropes connecting them. That picture, substance ontology, works brilliantly until it doesn't, and the places it doesn't are exactly the famous ones: quantum measurement, dark matter, the arrow of time, what an electron is between interactions.
The Open Universe proposes the opposite silhouette: no container, no passive objects. A dense, discrete, continuously-updating substrate where every locus hands state to its neighbors each tick, where "space" is the tension between adjacent updates, and where a "particle" is a pattern of traffic that fails to dissipate, a standing process, not a standing thing.
This is not a metaphor we ask you to accept. It is an engine we ask you to measure. We can't step outside reality to inspect what it is: all anyone can do is build a substrate that reproduces its how, and record how far the resemblance goes.
The instrument that runs this claim is moore26 — a discrete, local, causal lattice substrate at 0.1 fm per node. Particles are knots of trapped traffic; light is momentum in flight; every exchange is a negotiated transaction between neighbors. It reproduces stable rest mass, radiative decay, signed charge, pair production, and string-breaking confinement — all measured, all in the open. Where it stops matching nature is written down too, line by line.