What Does Radiant Heat Carry? — Thermal Radiation in Wavon Mechanics, and the Two Structures That Land on the Stefan–Boltzmann Constant

Abstract. Thermal radiation is among the phenomena standard physics computes mostprecisely. This paper does not try to improve that computation; it places answers where thestandard theory does not ask: why does heat leave as photons and nothing else, why is thatphoton a boson, why is absorption all or nothing. In the lattice of wavon mechanics there areexactly three seats for a field quantum, {a, aa, aaa} (Theorem 1), and counting the normalmodes of meridians coupled at the poles shows that two meridians (aa) have no circulatingmode and so cannot close on themselves, while only three (aaa) lock their phase at 120° andleave (Theorem 4). One meridian (a) likewise has no circulating mode. Free wavons thereforeexist but do not leave, and what lies laid down is the field itself. This is the reason heatcannot leave as a or aa and leaves only as aaa, and the standard theory has no such reason(that electromagnetic waves mediate radiation is an input there). Furthermore, the fact thata balanced seat (|L|2 = 0) is a boson and the fact that there are exactly two circulating modes1 / 10land together on one and the same measured constant: the Stefan–Boltzmann constant σ =5.670374419×10−8 W m−2K−4 contains both the polarization count 2 and Bose statistics, sothat with three polarizations σ would be 1.5 times larger and with Fermi statistics 7/8 aslarge (Appendix A [1]). That the seats of the field sector carry no conserved quantity at all (Q= Σ = |L|2 = 0) gives the reason a photon is not absorbed in pieces. Temperature is not thetotal energy received but the ledger of how that energy is distributed among the jitter ofbound charged wavons; that a blackbody depends on temperature alone, independently ofmaterial, is borrowed as a theorem forced by thermodynamics. The branching of the threechannels — magnet (zero frequency), wire (a neighbour present), light (no neighbour) — iswritten as one accounting, and two falsification clauses are registered. Every result agreeingwith the standard theory is reproduction, and there is no score.