Completing Newton's Project: From Least Action to Time Symmetric Ontology and the Origins of Force

Completing Newton’s Project: From Least Action to Time-Symmetric Ontology and the Origins of Force generalizes the Principle of Least Action (PLA) into a time-symmetric ontology (TSO) where physical, biological, and cognitive systems exist as regions of maximal mutual information between their initial and final boundary conditions. In this framework, reality is defined by the sustained overlap of forward- and backward-propagating informational flows. Local dynamics act to minimize boundary asymmetry (informational attraction) while preserving effective dimensionality (informational repulsion), yielding a universal conservation of coherence analogous to energy conservation in physics. Empirical invariants—ΔH → ln 2, antisymmetry ≈ 0, ρ ≈ –0.68—demonstrate that the same dual-boundary geometry governs coherence from quantum systems to cosmology. The paper unifies principles from variational mechanics, quantum information, biological organization, and cognitive inference, proposing that the fundamental forces of nature arise from gradients of informational consistency across reciprocal temporal boundaries. Accompanying repositories (EISM-Science GitHub and Zenodo mirrors) contain reproducible data and code for the quantum, biological, and AI analyses described.