Beauty is not a vibe. It is a structural signature.
Beauty can be treated as preference, or it can be treated as structure. This theory takes the second option. The feeling of beauty is treated as a detector signal. The object is treated as the carrier. Objectivity here does not mean universal agreement of taste. It means representation invariance. If the structure is real, it should survive changes of encoding, language, coordinate system, and description, up to trivial conventions.
The core problem is to define what kind of structure deserves the name. Two extremes fail immediately for structural reasons. Pure order is cheap. A crystal, a perfect tiling, a simple periodic pattern has a short rule, but once the rule is given there is little independent regularity left to discover. It has unity but low richness. Pure noise is expensive. A random pattern has endless detail, but it does not compress into law. It has richness as variety but low unity. Both extremes are degenerate, one collapses into repetition, the other collapses into listing.
If beauty is a structural property, it must live in the middle, but the middle is not a vibe. It has a shape, and it has three coupled axes.
First, a compact law core. This is the shortest unifying description that makes the object one thing rather than a pile. It is not necessarily written next to the object. It is the reason the object is compressible as a whole. It is the source of unity.
Second, a nontrivial regularity world. This means many modelable regularities, not just one repeated motif. It also means coupling. The regularities must constrain each other. If they are independent, the object becomes a catalogue, a bag of patterns. A catalogue can be generated by a short recipe, but the compiled result is not one coherent system. The beauty target is not maximal variety. It is maximal structured variety, regularities that interact.
Third, depth through unfolding. Depth is not "more pixels" and not "longer text." Depth is irreducible process. The object's concrete form at large scale exists because something had to unfold, and that unfolding is conserved as structure, as layering, reuse, and path dependence. A deep object carries history in its form. If the object could be produced directly with no meaningful unfolding, then it can be intricate but it is not deep in the sense meant here.
These three axes force a strong consequence. True beauty cannot be a single frozen point. It is a stable regime. The object must avoid degeneration under scaling. As more of it is revealed, it must not collapse into trivial periodicity, and it must not dissolve into incoherent noise. It must continue to generate new regularities while remaining one thing.
This is why mature cities, organisms, forests, and strong theories are useful reference classes, even when the theory is stated abstractly. They are systems rather than piles. Parts constrain other parts. Constraints exist at multiple levels at once. Modules recur with variation rather than strict repetition. New layers appear without erasing old ones. The whole remains compressible as a unit because the same lawlike motifs reappear across scales, but the object does not become wallpaper because the motifs are transformed and coupled, not merely copied.
The phrase "law core, unfolding, invariance" is therefore not poetic. It is the clean statement of the underlying reality. A short unifying core exists. The object's richness is produced by long unfolding rather than by arbitrary listing. The relevant structure survives changes of representation, because it is not an artifact of a particular encoding. When these conditions hold together, the object sits in the nondegenerate middle, unity without triviality, richness without incoherence, depth without mysticism.
The strongest version of the claim identifies beauty with the maximal density of explainable world per unit of unifying core, subject to nondegeneration. "Maximal" here does not mean a single image that beats all images in the universe. It means the direction of improvement, more coupled regularity, more conserved unfolding, more invariance, without losing unity. This is why the natural mathematical form of an "ultimate beautiful output" is often a limit object rather than a final snapshot. The point is not the rhetoric of infinity. The point is that a finite object can be beautiful and complete within its scope, but the ideal of unbounded beauty describes a regime that must remain stable as scale increases.
A practical reader does not need the mathematics to recognize the regime. The test is structural. Does understanding one part constrain what can be true elsewhere. Does the object remain coherent under paraphrase, translation, and re-description. Does it keep producing new regularities without becoming a repetitive tile or a random list. Does its complexity look like organized history rather than decorative complication. If yes, the object has the structural signature this theory calls true beauty.
True beauty is the nondegenerate middle where a compact core carries a world that keeps deepening without losing unity.