Editing Openai/6897769e-4ee4-800f-aba5-69cca34f701c (section)

=== You asked whether the photon is the exchange mechanism, and whether the electron’s half-spin might tie modes to mass (and even produce spin-2 graviton-like characteristics). These are excellent, physically motivated questions. Here’s a breakdown of how this could be framed and what remains to be shown. ===
# Photon ↔ electron exchange as bookkeeping of mass - In QAT you already posit that photon absorption/emission couples potential energy ↔ kinetic energy (electrons), and that bound/EM energy forms part of the mass-energy bookkeeping. - If each angular mode on the causal boundary represents a preferred resonant channel for such exchanges, then a tiny fraction of the EM energy tied up in those boundary modes could be permanently or semi-permanently stored (bound) as rest energy in matter—this supplies the energy budget for the growth of mass in Model 1/2. - For conservation: you must show an explicit channel for energy transfer from the global photon bath (or some reservoir) into bound mass that does not contradict observed photon backgrounds (CMB, extragalactic background light). Model 2 (photon-capture) is the place to check this quantitatively.
# Half-spin geometry and "mass per angular mode" - Geometrically, a fermion’s half-integer spin can be associated with SU(2) covering behavior and 2π vs 4π rotation properties; for a sphere there are natural angular harmonics (spherical harmonics Y_{ℓm}) and spinor harmonics. One can think of assigning spinor modes on the sphere rather than scalar modes. - If the microscopic boundary physics prefers spinor modes (because electrons are spin-½ and the boundary is formed by electron probability spheres), that reduces the effective count of independent modes (spinor harmonics have different counting rules), and could also change the per-mode energy assignment. - Your idea that an electron must "spin twice within the sphere" to recover the same orientation is a description of spinor behavior; mapping that to an effective spin-2 emergent field is more speculative. In scattering theory, two spin-1 photons can combine into effective spin-2 tensor excitations in second-order processes; equivalently, coherent pairs of EM interactions could produce effective quadrupole (tensor) responses that mimic gravity’s spin-2 coupling at long wavelengths. So the conceptual pathway exists: photon–electron exchanges (spin-1 absorption/emission) → paired/coherent processes → effective spin-2 behavior for the emergent interaction. - To make this quantitative you’d need a model showing how many paired-photon processes per mode occur, their effective long-range kernel, and whether that kernel reproduces the tensor coupling structure of GR’s stress-energy to geometry. That’s a hard but concrete calculation (diagrammatic QED → effective long-wavelength tensor coupling).
# Does this fix conservation? - If the boundary modes are counting existing EM energy that is re-partitioned into bound energy (not created ex nihilo), energy is conserved: EM reservoir → bound mass. The challenge is matching numbers: the integrated EM energy available in the Universe (starlight, CMB, relic photons) must be sufficient (or we must posit early-time conversion when photon densities were higher). - Another possibility: mass is not being created now at an observable rate; instead, the QAT counting simply maps existing mass/energy into angular-mode bookkeeping — i.e., mass is an emergent label assigned per mode but the total energy is conserved globally through detailed EM ↔ matter bookkeeping. That sidesteps problematic mass creation now but then requires an origin story for initial mass assignment (early universe epoch where conversion happened).