20 - Formalism: Light is Just Twisted Space?

The Void Dynamics Model (VDM) “force sector” requires long-range interactions to arise

from coarse degrees of freedom without postulating fundamental gauge fields. This CF

specifies a concrete U(1) construction: an emergent gauge potential is defined as the Berry

connection of a low-energy spinor bundle (imported from the domain-wall sector), and its

curvature is identified with the electromagnetic field strength. Under locality and gauge

redundancy, the low-energy effective action admits a derivative expansion whose leading

gauge-invariant term is the Maxwell operator R FµνF µν. Two attack surfaces are treated

as decisive falsifiers: (i) the connection must yield nontrivial, gauge-invariant plaquette

curvature and predominantly transverse modes, and (ii) the emergent photon must remain

gapless (within declared tolerance), producing a Coulomb 1/r potential rather than a Yukawa

tail. Compatibility with Weinberg–Witten is treated operationally: the emergent Aµ is a

bundle connection defined only up to local phase, not a gauge-invariant Lorentz vector created

by a local operator in the same Hilbert space as the conserved current. The deliverable is a

publishable derivation plus a compact gate suite (G1–G6) that a companion notebook CFN

must implement with auditable artifacts.