Cosmochrony: A Pre-Geometric Relational Framework for Emergent Physics

Cosmochrony is a pre-geometric relational framework in which time, spacetime geometry, and physical observables emerge from the irreversible relaxation of a single underlying substrate, denoted. The framework adopts a principle of ontological minimalism, postulating no fundamental spacetime, metric, or quantum structure. Instead, effective geometric, dynamical, and quantum descriptions arise only through coarse-grained, generally non-injective projections of admissible configurations. Within this approach, temporal ordering is identified with intrinsic monotonic relaxation, while spatial relations and curvature emerge as effective summaries of relational and spectral correlations. Bounded-response regimes naturally arise from saturation of relational relaxation fluxes, leading to Born--Infeld-like effective dynamics without introducing additional fundamental fields. In this context, the speed of light and Planck's constant are interpreted as complementary bounds on projectability and resolvability, rather than as primitive constants. Matter, inertia, and electric charge are described as stable or metastable invariants of the relaxation dynamics, associated with localized excitations and topological constraints of the projected description. Quantum indeterminacy, entanglement, and violations of Bell inequalities are interpreted as structural consequences of non-injective projection, without invoking superluminal influences or fundamental wavefunction collapse. At macroscopic scales, gravitation is treated as a collective effect of inhibited relaxation, recovering general-relativistic phenomenology in appropriate regimes. At galactic and cosmological scales, the same saturation mechanism provides an effective interpretation of flat galaxy rotation curves and environment-dependent Hubble parameter inference, without invoking dark matter particles or a fundamental dark energy component. Cosmochrony is presented as a unifying structural framework rather than a complete replacement for established physical theories. Its primary role is to clarify how time, geometry, quantum phenomena, and large-scale cosmological behavior may consistently emerge from a common pre-geometric relational substrate, and to organize a set of testable effective predictions developed in companion works.