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

=== Short, plain-language verdict for outreach ===
* The QAT picture — time as local photon-electron exchange and geometry emerging from spherical wavefronts — is conceptually rich and meshes well with decoherence and the idea that events define time.
* Turning that beautiful picture into a quantitative mechanism for gravity at galactic & cosmological scales runs straight into hard constraints (energy budgets, lensing in colliding clusters, equivalence principle tests). Those constraints do not falsify the idea that EM geometry plays an important role in microphysics (e.g., origin of inertia, quantization), but they do make it unlikely that ordinary EM energy alone explains galactic gravity without extra structure or new physics.
* The most promising route is an emergent-gravity style derivation (Sakharov-like) where QAT microphysics induces an effective gravitational action; this is mathematically demanding but a concrete and respectable program.