Anchored Causality Theory: A Record-History Ontology for Open Quantum Systems

Quantum mechanics describes a wave that spreads and interferes; a detector records a particle at one place and time. Anchored Causality Theory (ACT) accounts for both: the electron is a stable wave-mode structure of one composite field, never a particle on a path. A detector's bath of photons and atoms keeps a record that tells the alternatives apart, say the two lobes of a wave behind two slits. The record is released, beyond recall, when nothing the system will actually undergo can restore interference. One alternative becomes an event: a mark in the one actual history. No observer is needed; Schrödinger evolution is never modified. Four thought experiments, each performed in the laboratory, carry the argument. An unread lossy slab removes the fringes; a tunable coupling sets their fading rate; a reversible filter sorts the field's components, producing no event; and single marks build fringes with no path recorded, a particle pattern once a path record is released. For an event of ACT's kind, eraser and recovery experiments exclude every earlier moment tested; release is the earliest allowed. ACT changes no quantum prediction and adds one commitment: one history of released records is actual. No event leaves two marks: proved where the bath returns no record, assumed beyond. Given refinable records, two requirements force Born weights: a record's chance here is unchanged by whether records are made elsewhere and continuous in the wave. A covariant release criterion is open. The wave is what exists; the particle is what happens.