THE GEOMETRIC NATURE OF LIGHT, From Ancient Substrate to Quantum Field. A Continuous-Field Reading of Twenty-Five Centuries of Optical Inquiry

This paper traces a structural intuition across twenty-five centuries of optical inquiry: light is a localized perturbation propagating through a continuous medium that is space itself. The thread runs from the visual rays of Empedocles, through Aristotle's actualization of the transparent, the medieval Latin and Islamic optical traditions, the Newton-Huygens bifurcation, Maxwell's electromagnetic synthesis, and the twentieth-century revolution culminating in quantum field theory. The interpretive position the paper develops is the neo-Lorentzian reading of relativistic and quantum field-theoretic physics. The substrate is taken to be physically real and continuous. Lorentz-invariance is treated as an emergent feature of the substrate's dynamics rather than as a metaphysical primitive. Empirical predictions are identical to those of standard special relativity in tested regimes; ontological commitments are stronger and clearer.
The reading dissolves several interpretive paradoxes that the standard reading leaves open. Wave-particle duality is reframed as the meeting of a continuous substrate with discrete matter at the point of registration. Time dilation is reframed as a path-dependent rate of internal-process accumulation between shared boundary events, without invoking time as a substance or dimension. Cosmological metric expansion is understood as the substrate's bodily extension, distinct from and not bounded by the propagation rate of perturbations within it. Black-hole event horizons are global features of substrate geometry rather than local field-strength extrema. Closed-timelike-curve paradoxes dissolve at their premise on substrate-thermodynamic grounds.
The framework is empirically equivalent to standard physics in essentially all currently tested regimes. Section 11 enumerates eleven specific falsifiable predictions that distinguish the framework from standard interpretations in regimes where current observations are not yet definitive. Eight of these carry substrate-specific content; three are consistency tests with standard physics. Among the distinguishing predictions, the prohibition of phantom dark energy (w(z) ≥ -1 strictly) is in active empirical tension with DESI DR1 and DR2 observations at the 2.5-3.9σ level, with the framework's prediction at risk of falsification within the next several years rather than at the formal Stage-IV timeline. The framework is not protected from refutation by its interpretive character; the interpretive commitments produce predictive consequences in regimes where current physics is not definitive, and those consequences are testable.