What follows is not merely an alternative framework but an indictment of nearly a century of intellectual cowardice masquerading as profundity. The so-called "wave-particle duality"—that mystical hodgepodge which has elevated measurement to cosmic significance and imported consciousness into physics like some New Age infection—can and must be replaced by what Maxwell already gave us: electromagnetic induction through impedance-varied media. The mathematics works; the predictions hold; and crucially, one need not abandon one's faculties of reason to comprehend it.
Let us speak plainly about what the Copenhagen interpretation has wrought upon physics. For nearly one hundred years, we have been asked—nay, required—to believe that consciousness itself plays a fundamental role in the behaviour of light; that observation does not merely interact
