Physical Time as Information-Registered Closed Phase Surface: Time-as-Memory, Phase-Stiffness Forces, Weak-Decay Perturbability, and Horizon Thermodynamics

This manuscript presents a unifying physical framework built around one object: a closed-light carrier on a complex phase surface. The carrier is not treated as a point moving through ordinary three-dimensional space. Before measurement, it exists as physical distinguishability in the complex phase domain: it can be physically active and can later affect ordinary records, but it does not yet appear as a visible trajectory, position, or linear-time event in 3+1 record-space. The central proposal is that linear physical time is the ordered registration of physical change into record. A record may be a clock reading, a track, a detector click, a pointer state, an environmental correlation, or any stable physical trace. Measurement is therefore not what makes the underlying phase structure real; it is the operation that writes part of that structure into ordinary three-dimensional record-space and linear temporal order, with a thermodynamic cost. From this starting point, the manuscript develops a common architecture for domains that are usually treated separately. Mass is described as closed-light Compton throughput. Special relativity appears as the partition of that throughput between temporal registration and recorded motion. Gravity appears as radial loading of registration capacity. Electromagnetism appears as a phase-connection readout. Thermodynamics appears as the cost, direction, and irreversibility of writing physical change into record. Horizon entropy is interpreted as the saturated boundary count of the same underlying phase surface. The framework is not presented as a theory of everything. It does not discard established physics, but proposes a deeper primitive from which the standard structures arise as different readouts of one phase-registration mechanism. In this sense, quantum phase, relativistic time, gravitational time distortion, thermodynamic irreversibility, electromagnetic coupling, weak decay, strong-sector closure, and horizon counting are not placed side by side. They become different expressions of the same object under different registration conditions. The empirical core is the weak sector. The manuscript proposes a taxonomy of radioactive-decay perturbability: decay channels are environmentally perturbable only through degrees of freedom required for reverse daughter-to-parent reconstruction. This requires local reverse temporal registration and gives the framework a direct empirical handle. A second prospective test predicts photon arrival-time delay with no linear Planck-energy term and leading quadratic Planck suppression. The result is a compact unification principle: physics is the registration geometry of closed phase. What is hidden from ordinary three-dimensional motion may still be physically active in the complex phase domain; what measurement does is write part of that activity into record. Time is the ordered trace of that writing, mass is closed-light throughput, and force is the gradient of how registration capacity changes across record-space.