Physics Has Always Been Unified: General Timelessness, Null Proper Time, and the Clarified Architecture - Why Quantum Mechanics and Relativity Were Never in Competition

Physics is already unified. The unification is not a mathematical framework yet to be discovered. It is an interpretive fact already present in the existing theories, unrecognized because the ontological consequences of null proper time were not consistently applied. The unified description begins from a simple distinction: laws are not time. Physical reality is governed by lawful structure, but time is not a constituent of that structure. A mathematical expression of a law may include a time parameter; that symbolic reference does not make time a component of the law itself. Time belongs to spacetime relations. Some outcomes permitted by lawful structure register within spacetime and thereby possess temporal ordering, causal relation, geometric localization, and observability. This yields a division of explanatory labor that the existing theories already perform: Quantum mechanics describes lawful eligibility: the admissible outcomes and the mathematical relations governing their amplitudes and probabilities. Special and general relativity govern relativistic registration: the coherent spacetime organization of registered outcomes. These are not competing descriptions of one temporal process. They describe different aspects of one lawful order. The diagnostic clue is null proper time. A photon accumulates no proper time. This is not a mathematical curiosity. It means the ordinary persistence narrative, in which a physical thing travels through successive spacetime locations while accumulating a history, does not apply to light. Once that consequence is honored, timebound spacetime registration is recognized as the special case in which time applies rather than the general condition under which law holds. The paper applies the resulting architecture to entanglement (one lawful relation, two local registrations, no propagation speed to compare with c), the measurement problem, and the double slit, and states explicitly what it does not claim. No new equations are required. No existing predictions are altered. The contribution is interpretive: recognizing what the existing theories already describe. Part of the Timeless Light Model (TLM) corpus.