Why is there something rather than nothing? Recognition Science answers that long-standing question by replacing the usual ontology of "objects obeying laws" with a single bookkeeping rule: every act of distinguishing A from ¬A creates a recognition link whose cost is J(X) = 1/2 (X + 1/X). A perfectly empty ledger cannot acknowledge its own emptiness without contradicting that rule, so at least one unpaired link must appear. The cheapest self-consistent way to cancel the resulting imbalance is a golden-ratio self-dual lattice whose expansion manifests as space, energy, and curvature. Time is nothing more than the ordered queue of cost repayments; gravity is the backlog of unpaired costs; photons are debt-removal packets; and the observed constants (α^(-1) ≈ 137.036, G, the CMB peak pattern) follow with no free parameters. This paper builds the entire framework from first principles, derives the emergent physics step by step, and outlines falsifiable predictions such as axial-boson signatures and photon-bath torsion drifts. The universe, in this view, is the minimal audit trail required for the ledger to know itself.