The Wave Sector
The double-slit experiment presents a fundamental tension: electromagnetic radiation propagates as coherent waves, yet produces discrete, localised, particle-like detection events. This paper proposes a deterministic wave-only mechanism — the QERP framework — that resolves this tension without invoking wavefunction collapse or particle ontology. Discrete detection events emerge naturally from continuous wave propagation through a time-varying background field representing vacuum polarisation.
The double-slit experiment presents a fundamental tension: electromagnetic radiation propagates as coherent waves with macroscopic coherence lengths, yet produces discrete, localised, particle-like detection events. This paper proposes a deterministic wave-only mechanism — the QERP (Quantum Emergence from Resonance in Polarisable vacuum) framework — that resolves this tension without invoking wavefunction collapse or particle ontology.
Building on established wave physics — specifically caustics and branched flow in weakly structured media — discrete detection events emerge naturally from continuous wave propagation through a time-varying background field representing vacuum polarisation. The central insight is temporal: three-dimensional caustic structures migrate as the vacuum field evolves, creating transient localised intensity maxima. When these maxima trigger threshold-based resonant detectors, discrete "clicks" result from purely continuous dynamics.
Numerical simulation of the double-slit geometry using physically realistic parameters demonstrates this mechanism, reproducing both the familiar interference pattern in time-averaged intensity and discrete, localised detection events in instantaneous detector response.
The underlying caustic structures are in principle unobservable — hidden behind a measurement horizon in a manner dual to the unobservability of the one-way speed of light — yet their existence explains the emergence of discrete detection from continuous wave dynamics. Quantities conventionally attributed to "photons" — energy quanta and discrete detection — arise as emergent properties of wave-detector interaction.
The central claim is precisely that no discrete particles propagate between source and detector. Quantisation of detection arises from the resonant structure of matter (detectors), not from discreteness in the field itself.
Extensions to the monopolon sector (as topological solitons), entanglement, and gravity are developed in subsequent papers of this series.