What Is Mass? A Geometric Interpretation of Inertia and Collapse in Modal Survival Fields

This paper reinterprets the concept of mass within the Unified Vibrational Field Theory (UVFT), framing it as a resistance to modal dropout in the coherence substrate. Mass is no longer treated as a primitive or intrinsic property, but as the accumulated strain required to maintain a modal structure against geometrically induced collapse. This modal strain is encoded in curvature and torsion across coherence paths. The resulting formulation reveals mass as a dropout rigidity measure — a persistence condition in coherence geometry — and yields an alternative path to inertial and gravitational effects from first principles.