The Law of Baseline Conservation in Phase-Shift Cosmology

Phase-Shift Cosmology (PSC) proposes that the universe operates on a rigid, flat Minkowski substrate where all physical phenomena are expressions of phase. Within this framework, something fundamental must be true: every phase field, regardless of what it describes, must return to its baseline. We call this the Law of Baseline Conservation (LBC). LBC is not derived from more primitive assumptions — it is a foundational axiom of PSC. It says simply that phase fields do not drift. Whatever perturbations occur locally, the field returns to its vacuum baseline at the boundaries of any phase regime. In native PSC units — radians and phase time τ — this is a clean, dimensionless statement requiring no conversion to SI or astronomical units. We show that LBC constrains the baryonic phase field Φ to evolve within a potential V(Φ) that has a stable minimum at the vacuum baseline Φ₀. We further show that this constraint, combined with the rigid substrate, resolves previous dimensional inconsistencies in PSC and provides a unified foundation for all subsequent field descriptions including the Damped Phase Law.