By Timm Johnson | Dakota Intelligence | Theoretical Physics Research There's a number in physics that nobody likes to talk about at dinner. It's 10¹²⁰. A 1 followed by 120 zeroes. That's the ratio between what quantum field theory predicts the vacuum energy of the universe should be, and what we actually observe. It's not a small rounding error. It's not an off-by-a-few-percent calibration issue. It's the largest known discrepancy between theory and observation in the history

By Timm Johnson | Dakota Intelligence Research Lab | April 2026 Independent theoretical physics research from Mitchell, South Dakota. No institution. No permission slip. Just the work. The Question Nobody's Asking Quite Right Physics has two great theories. Both are spectacularly successful. Both are almost certainly incomplete. Quantum mechanics rules the subatomic world with brutal precision. General relativity bends space and time across galactic scales. They work beautifu

A South Dakota autodidact asks a fundamental question about the nature of time, causality, and quantum mechanics — and builds a formal framework to answer it. An introduction to the Temporal Node Architecture (TNA).