A Unified Propagation Geometry for Matter and Electromagnetism

For more than a century, quantum mechanics and electromagnetism have been taught as fundamentally different kinds of theories: one built from a single wavefunction, the other from two real fields that generate each other. This work shows that the difference was never essential. Beneath the familiar formalism, both matter and light share the same underlying architecture: each is a real two‑component system whose parts sustain one another through first‑order propagation. In this framework, the wavefunction is not an abstract complex object but a real pair of internal quadratures selected by a physical clock axis. Maxwell’s electric and magnetic fields are another such pair, selected by the same axis and transported by the same geometric connection. The unity is not metaphorical — it is encoded directly in the action. The same internal direction that determines matter’s internal rotation also determines the electromagnetic sector that survives at long range. Nothing in this reinterpretation alters the tested predictions of quantum mechanics or electromagnetism. What changes is the meaning: phase becomes real geometry, the wavefunction becomes a two‑quadrature field, and electromagnetism emerges as the about‑axis transport of the same clock structure that governs matter. This reveals a simple, coherent propagation principle underlying two pillars of physics.