The Wave Model of Light as a Continuum Artefact: Corpuscular Dissolution and Downstream Consequences Across Physics

Wave-particle duality is not a discovery about the nature of light. It is a confession about the limits of the continuum. Because the mathematical framework that dominated physics from the seventeenth century through the twentieth presupposes that space is a continuous manifold, two and only two mechanisms were available to transmit influence through that manifold: localised transport by particles and distributed propagation by waves. When optical phenomena divided themselves between the two accounts, the conclusion of duality was not forced by observation. It was forced by the framework. Within Quantum-Geometry Dynamics (QGD), the ontological situation is different from the outset. Space is constituted by preons(−): discrete, fundamental units that are the totality of space. Matter is constituted by preons(+): kinetic units each carrying a constant intrinsic momentum magnitude c̃, propagating through preonic space by discrete leaps. There are no continuous fields, no wave-supporting medium, and no field modes. The ontological conditions that make the wave model necessary in continuum physics do not exist in QGD. This paper proceeds in three stages. The first establishes the terminological foundation: every wave-model quantity used in optics is replaced by its exact QGD counterpart. The second provides the corpuscular dissolution: for each phenomenon historically taken to require a wave account — reflection, refraction, diffraction, interference, the photoelectric effect, the Doppler effect, gravitational redshift — a complete derivation from QGD’s discrete momentum-transfer mechanics is given. The third traces downstream consequences: the wave model, once installed as fundamental in optics, propagated specific theoretical structures into quantum field theory, the Standard Model, and ΛCDM cosmology that each produce structural pathologies — ultraviolet divergences, the gauge hierarchy problem, the cosmological constant problem, the horizon problem — which dissolve once the corpuscular ontology is consistently maintained. Eight observational results from 2024–2026 that are in tension with the accepted models are shown to be consistent with predictions QGD made from its two axioms independently of those observations.