The Phase Parachute

Why Things Keep Moving Expansion Freedom Theory Why Does a Moving Object Keep Moving? The question Newton left unanswered — and what the universe's expansion has to do with it JongJin Ma  ·  September 2026  ·  Full paper on Zenodo ↗ A hockey puck slides across frictionless ice. It doesn't slow down. It doesn't stop. It keeps going — indefinitely. Everyone accepts this. Nobody explains it. Newton's first law of motion — a body in uniform motion continues unless acted upon by an external force — is among the most tested statements in all of physics. But here is what textbooks quietly skip over: why does the velocity persist? What maintains it? The law describes what happens. It offers no mechanism. For three centuries, this has been treated as a primitive axiom — a given, not a theorem. My Expansion Freedom Theory (EFT) proposes that this is a mistake, and that the answer has been hiding in plain sight: the universe is exp...

Image credit: NASA / JPL Expansion Freedom Theory https://zenodo.org/records/21199818 Gravitational Flux Transport Networks · Expansion Freedom Theory Why Did the Spiral Arms of Galaxies Form? Every stable orbit has a ceiling — and it's lower than the point where orbits stop existing altogether. That instability boundary, not some mysterious force, is where the spiral begins. JongJin Ma  ·  July 2026  ·  Expansion Freedom Theory series Our own solar system almost certainly had spiral arms once. In the early, crowded disk of gas and debris around the young Sun, countless small bodies moved on paths that were not yet clean ellipses — some drifted inward and were consumed, some were flung outward and lost, and a very particular subset survived: the ones whose speed happened to match a stable orbit at their distance. What we call "the solar system" today is really the surviving pop...

This infrared image, from NASA Spitzer Space Telescope, of M100 is a classic example of a grand design spiral galaxy, with prominent and well-defined spiral arms winding from the hot center, out to the cooler edges of the galaxy. Picture From NASA/JPL Paper v6.6 zenodo.org/records/21199818 — Not Just Mass: Expanding Space Also Curves Light and Drives Orbital Motion Expansion Freedom Theory · v6.6 Not Just Mass: Expanding Space Also Curves Light Why dark matter appears at large scales, why spiral arms wind the wrong way for a trailing structure, and why the standard rotation-curve measurement has a systematic problem — all from one principle. JongJin Ma · July 2026 · phase-parachute.blogspot.com Central Claim Expanding space (H²r) curves light and contributes to orbital speeds — not mass alone. Anything that expands toward a passing body curves its path. Mass expa...

Image credit: NASA / JPL Paper v6.5 https://zenodo.org/records/20958269 Expansion Freedom Theory · Two Perspectives Newton Saw Gravity. Hubble Saw Expansion. They Were Looking at the Same Equation. Why the universe appears to pull things together from one vantage point — and push them apart from another — and why both appearances are correct. JongJin Ma  ·  2026  ·  phase-parachute.blogspot.com For four hundred years, gravity and cosmic expansion have been treated as separate phenomena. Newton described gravity as an attractive force between masses. Hubble described expansion as space stretching between galaxies. The two pictures seemed to belong to different scales of the universe — gravity governs planets and stars; expansion governs the cosmos. They were both looking at the same equation, at different distances. Near a mass, one term dominates and the other van...

Image credit: NASA /JSC Paper v6.4 https://zenodo.org/records/20815211 Expansion Freedom Theory · Mercury Why Mercury Never Quite Comes Back A small mystery that stumped physicists for 56 years — and what it reveals about the nature of space itself. JongJin Ma  ·  2026  ·  phase-parachute.blogspot.com Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun. It completes one orbit every 88 days. And every time it returns to the point in its orbit closest to the Sun — a point called the perihelion — it arrives at a slightly different place than before. Not by much. About 43 arcseconds per century. To put that in perspective: it takes roughly 8,400 years for the perihelion to drift by a single degree. You would never notice it in a lifetime of watching. But physicists noticed. And for 56 years — from 1859 to 1915 — nobody could explain it. Then Einstein's General Relativity predict...