Material-Phase Antenna Architectures: A Tool-First Framework for Metric Discovery in Under-Measured Physical Regimes

Version 2 adds the six material antenna families that motivate the framework, a section grounding the required discipline in the author's already published measured work, and states the proposal explicitly as a research programme for observing the universe through material response rather than through incoming radiation alone. No measurement is reported and no discovery is claimed in either version. Modern instrumentation measures the physical world across an extraordinary range of channels: electromagnetic radiation, particles, fields and plasma, neutrinos, and gravitational waves. This paper does not report a measurement and does not claim a discovery. It proposes a conceptual framework for a class of measurement architectures, here called material-phase antennas, together with a discipline for using them to ask one methodological question: whether some physical variables remain under-measured not because the relevant signal is weak, but because existing instruments are not built to respond to the form in which that variable would appear. This is termed the metric-mismatch hypothesis, and a tool-first metric-discovery framework is developed around it. The framework separates four measurement channels (signal-targeting, material-response, resonance-lock, and measurement-window), defines a small set of candidate target metrics, and binds every channel to baseline, control, artifact rejection, and falsification before any interpretation. Prior art is acknowledged explicitly: phase-change materials, reconfigurable antennas, metasurfaces, and resonant detection are all established; the contribution is the synthesis and the reframing, not the invention of components. A worked example based on a vanadium-dioxide resonator shows how a single channel is defined operationally. This is a framework proposal: it offers a disciplined way to look, not a claim about what has been found. The work continues the author's coupling-state line of analysis.