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

=== Assistant: I love the historical sweep here—Hooke, Challis, Kelvin/Bjerknes—because it puts your QAT intuition spherical waves + p… ===
I love the historical sweep here—Hooke, Challis, Kelvin/Bjerknes—because it puts your QAT intuition (spherical waves + phase + 1/r² geometry) in a long line of attempts to “explain” gravity as a wave process. Let me be straight and constructive:

==== - Shared geometry: Both EM flux and Newtonian gravity scale like 1/r² from spherical spreading. Your “spherical boundary → area → rates” story is a clean geometric backbone. ====
* Huygens surfaces as ‘now’: Treating the 2-D lightfront as the evolving boundary that clocks change (absorption/emission/scattering) meshes well with a thermodynamic/optical reading of time’s arrow: irreversible photon exchange → decoherence → classical change.
* Thermodynamic flavor: “Bookkeeping of energy flows” naturally dovetails with the Third Law and with known thermodynamic/entropic views of spacetime (gravity from energy–information flow across null/lightlike surfaces).

==== If we try to make gravity itself be the net effect of EM wave exchange, we immediately hit these data-driven hurdles: ====
# Universality of free fall (equivalence principle): Gravity couples to all forms of energy the same way. EM coupling depends on charge, polarization, frequency, phase, etc. Precision Eötvös tests constrain composition-dependence to ≲10⁻¹³. A purely EM mechanism would violate this unless it somehow couples identically to neutral stuff (neutrons, neutrinos, cold dielectrics) with no phase sensitivity.
# Temperature independence of weight: If gravity came from ongoing EM emission, hot things should “gravitate more” than cold ones (big radiance ∝ T⁴). But a cold tungsten mass and a hot tungsten mass of the same rest mass weigh the same to exquisite accuracy. (Room-temperature radiation energy density u=aT4u=aT^4u=aT4 is ~6×10−66\times10^{-6}6×10−6 J/m³ → equivalent mass density u/c2∼7×10−23u/c^2\sim 7\times10^{-23}u/c2∼7×10−23 kg/m³: utterly negligible.)
# Phase/sign problem (Bjerknes analogy): Out-of-phase pulsators repel in a fluid. Gravity between ordinary masses is always attractive, independent of any EM phase. Real EM waves do repel via radiation pressure; we don’t see that in Cavendish-type tests.
# Shielding: EM effects can be screened/absorbed; gravity cannot be shielded. No gravitational “shadowing” is observed.
# Static vs radiative fields: Gravity is there for static masses in the dark. EM radiation isn’t required to maintain a static 1/r² gravitational field.
# Known GR tests: Light bending, gravitational redshift, perihelion advance, frame dragging, binary pulsar decay, and LIGO signals all match GR’s curvature story (gravity = spacetime geometry sourced by total stress–energy, not just EM).

==== Here’s a synthesis that preserves the good geometry while respecting observations: ====
* Keep Maxwell and Einstein unchanged. Let gravity remain what GR says: curvature from the stress–energy tensor TμνT_{\mu\nu}Tμν of everything (matter, fields, radiation). EM contributes, but it’s usually tiny compared with rest-mass energy.
* Use your lightfronts to define the local ‘present’. Your Huygens spheres are null surfaces (lightlike). Their focusing/defocusing is governed by the Raychaudhuri equation for null congruences: dθdλ=−12θ2−σ2+ω2−Rμνkμkν,\frac{d\theta}{d\lambda} = -\tfrac12\theta^2 - \sigma^2 + \omega^2 - R_{\mu\nu}k^\mu k^\nu,dλdθ=−21θ2−σ2+ω2−Rμνkμkν, and, with Einstein’s equations, Rμνkμkν∝TμνkμkνR_{\mu\nu}k^\mu k^\nu \propto T_{\mu\nu}k^\mu k^\nuRμνkμkν∝Tμνkμkν. Meaning: energy flux through the lightfront (including EM) focuses the wavefront—this is a rigorous way to say your “wavefront curvature works in unison.” It also embeds your time-arrow: irreversible energy flow across these boundaries → entropy production → decoherence.
* Boundary mechanics is your language. On each spherical boundary (electron shell, lightfront), the Poynting flux S=E×H\mathbf S=\mathbf E\times\mathbf HS=E×H through area 4πr24\pi r^24πr2 sets event rates (absorption/scattering), which sets decoherence and thus “world-updates.” That is fully compatible with Maxwell (unchanged) and gives you the geometric 1/r² without saying EM is gravity.
* Inertia as cumulative exchange: You can keep your intuition that repeated photon–electron momentum exchanges on the 2-D boundary “write” inertia (resistance to rapid state change). Formally it’s just the standard momentum conservation with EM + matter, but your boundary Lagrangian makes the geometry explicit.

==== 1. Decoherence scales with photon event rate For a two-level system: ====

Γ2(I,Δ)=Γ2+Rsc(I,Δ)+γenv,Rsc≈Γ2s1+s+(2Δ/Γ)2.\Gamma_2(I,\Delta)=\frac{\Gamma}{2}+R_{\rm sc}(I,\Delta)+\gamma_{\rm env},\quad
R_{\rm sc}\approx \frac{\Gamma}{2}\frac{s}{1+s+(2\Delta/\Gamma)^2}.Γ2(I,Δ)=2Γ+Rsc(I,Δ)+γenv,Rsc≈2Γ1+s+(2Δ/Γ)2s.
Turn up the photon flux → faster “becoming classical.” This is your arrow-of-time knob and already standard in quantum optics.
# Null-surface focusing by energy flux Not just EM: any energy crossing the lightfront (including thermal photons, phonons via conversion, etc.) contributes to focusing. This is the precise GR-compatible embodiment of “wavefront curvature in unison.”
# No composition dependence in weight QAT must predict no measurable change in gravitational attraction when you vary ambient EM fields around cold test masses (beyond the utterly tiny u/c2u/c^2u/c2 contribution). That keeps you safe against the equivalence-principle data.

==== - Photon-bath–dependent ''coherence'', not weight. Vary controlled photon baths (intensity, spectrum) around atoms/ions and measure T2T_2T2 (Ramsey, spin echoes). You’ll see the scaling above—this is the “time unfolds by exchange” part of QAT. ====
* Plasma scale (your double-layers): Use MHD to show how current sheets and double layers arise from boundary-driven EM geometry. That’s a good QAT–plasma bridge (still consistent with GR for gravity, but rich EM structure at large scales).
* Boundary action unification: Continue the boundary-Lagrangian program: surface current jaAaj^aA_ajaAa for EM, plus a geometric (extrinsic curvature) term for the lightfront; show that Maxwell and the standard EM boundary conditions drop out unchanged, and that coupling to the null congruence reproduces the GR focusing term. That’s a clean, publishable framework.

===== - I don’t think gravity = EM waves can survive the precision data (universality, temperature independence, shielding, phase). =====
* I do think your core claim—time’s arrow and classical change rate are set by photon–matter exchange on spherical boundaries—is both true (in standard quantum optics) and powerful as a geometric narrative.
* Framed this way, QAT coexists with Maxwell and Einstein (unchanged), while giving a boundary-geometry story for why “process” has direction, how 1/r² arises, and why decoherence tracks photon flux.

If you’d like, I can now (i) write the brief GR-compatible derivation of null-congruence focusing from a boundary action (just the key steps), or (ii) craft a short “QAT position” blurb you can pin under videos to preempt the “EM-causes-gravity” objection and explain the above synthesis clearly.