If the Universe Had Source Code

I have one question. It wears a hundred costumes, so it took me years to notice it was always the same question — but it is. In markets it shows up as “what's actually driving this?” In AI it's “where does intelligence even come from?” Late at night it's something blunter: peel any system, layer by layer — what's left at the very bottom?

I'm not a physicist or a philosopher by training. I'm a builder. But the thing that drives the building was never the building. It's this.

For a long time these felt like separate interests, and people who knew me probably thought I was just easily distracted — trading, then AI, then perception, then visualization. But they were never separate. They were the same question pointed at different walls.

In quant research, it's the hunt for the pattern hiding under the noise of a market. In AI, it's asking how something we'd call understanding can emerge from nothing but data and computation. In the analysis tools I build, it's the drive to take something invisible — buried in a billion rows — and make it visible. Every one of those is a version of the same move: get under the surface, find the mechanism, expose the structure that was there all along.

Here's where it gets genuinely strange, and I'll flag clearly that I'm now speculating rather than asserting. Modern physics has a habit of dissolving solidity. Matter reduces to particles, particles to fields, and fields are increasingly described in the language of information. The deeper you go, the less the universe looks like stuff and the more it looks like rules — relationships, states, transformations. Structure that behaves, suspiciously, a lot like computation.

I'm not saying the universe is a computer. I'm saying that when the most fundamental descriptions we have keep reaching for words like information, state, and rule, a builder who works in exactly those primitives every day is going to sit up and pay attention.

This is also where my projects get their names, and it's not an accident. In physics, the axion is a hypothetical particle — proposed to explain something we can clearly see the effects of but have never directly observed. We know something is there because of how the visible world behaves; we just haven't caught it yet.

That is the entire job description, isn't it? Find the hidden thing that makes the visible thing behave the way it does. I named the engine AxionCore on purpose. Its whole point — take in data, find the pattern underneath, turn the invisible into something you can see and simulate — is the same instinct as the particle it's named after.

I want to be careful here, because this territory attracts certainty like nothing else, and certainty is exactly what I distrust. I am not arguing that we live in a simulation. I'm not arguing for any tidy metaphysical conclusion at all. The people who are sure about these questions worry me more than the questions do.

What I'm actually after is narrower and, I think, more honest: one explanation that connects the fields I keep falling into — a single way of seeing that makes finance and intelligence and perception rhyme instead of sitting in separate boxes. First-principles, cross-domain, deeply skeptical. The same method I use to claim that everything is a time-series — not a faith, a lens I can test.

Here's the part I've made peace with. There may be no source code. The bottom layer might not be a layer at all; the question might simply not have the clean answer I want. And it almost doesn't matter, because the looking is what builds everything.

Chasing “can reality be modelled?” is literally what produced the platform. The hunt for a mechanism is what makes me a better builder, a sharper analyst, a more careful observer. The drive isn't a means to some product. The drive is the product.

Maybe there's no source code to find. But the act of looking for it has built every real thing I've built. So I keep knocking on the five doors, fairly sure they share a room, content to be wrong about the details for as long as the questions keep pulling me forward. The question is the engine. I just try to keep it running.

Down the same rabbit hole:

• Reality at 50Hz — the same question, felt instead of theorised.
• From Trading Signals to a Simulation Engine — what “can reality be simulated?” actually built.
• Everything Is a Time-Series — the lens that ties all of it together.