Quantum Mechanics from a Principle of Least Information and a Reflection-Symmetric Auxiliary Time

This paper develops a foundations program built on two ingredients: a Principle of Least Information (PLI) and a second, Gaussian auxiliary time. PLI is elevated to a law on par with relativity and least action: among all consistent law-and-boundary descriptions, Nature realises the one with the shortest algorithmic code. In practice, PLI eliminates gratuitous parameters, favours minimal structures, and (within a natural stability class) selects a Gaussian kernel for the auxiliary time.

Introducing an orthogonal Gaussian time coordinate yields a natural influence functional: integrating over this axis induces completely positive, trace-preserving (CPTP) dynamics on ordinary time. From this, the decoherence functional and strong positivity follow, recovering the Born rule without adding measurement postulates. The same construction leads directly to the GKSL master equation, clarifies POVMs and measurement as information-threshold phenomena, preserves no-signalling, and predicts visibility–information trade-offs and quantum-Zeno thresholds.

In this minimal PLI + 2t architecture, the operational content of quantum mechanics is reproduced while unifying consistent-histories, path-integral, and open-systems viewpoints—without ad hoc collapse dynamics. The framework provides both a conceptual explanation of quantum phenomena and concrete, falsifiable signatures, including directional Zeno effects and quantitative bounds linking interference visibility to recorded information.