Quantum Echo Damping: Emergent Reality from Relaxation in a Memory-Bearing Spacetime

Wepresent Quantum Echo Damping —theproposal that residual quantumamplitudes left behind by quantum transitions undergo continuous exponentialdecay through a memory-bearing spacetime medium, and that this dampingprocess is the physical origin of time itself. We call these residual amplitudesquantum echoes; their decay is quantum echo damping.The central physical postulate is that spacetime is a viscoelastic mediumobeying a Kelvin–Voigt constitutive law. From this one postulate, togetherwith three structural requirements, we derive without additional assumptions:(1) the arrow of time as a theorem; (2) wavefunction collapse as asymptoticecho damping, eliminating the need for a separate collapse postulate; (3) thematter/radiation distinction as overdamped versus underdamped echo regimes;Lagrangian density for the echo field.technology.(4) the specious present as the echo coherence window; and (5) a well-definedWe name this framework the Echoflux Theory of Time (ETT). The theorycontains two free parameters—the echo frequency ω and damping rate γ—whose physical identification with measurable laboratory quantities is thesubject of the companion paper in this series.Five experimental predictions of ETT follow directly, all testable with existing