Introduction

1 Introduction

Why does the universe exhibit wave-like behaviour at small scales? Standard quantum mechanics takes the wavefunction as a primitive object and the Born rule as a postulate. The present paper pursues a different direction, building on the informational framework of Papers I–VI [meskanen2001, meskanen2002, meskanen2003, meskanen2026iv, meskanen2026v, meskanen2026vi]: the universe is a finite, static collection of n bits, and an internal observer experiences a path through its 2ⁿ configurations. The path selected is the one that compresses best. The wavefunction is the codec.

The analogy that makes this precise is video compression. In MPEG, a video is encoded not as a sequence of raw frames but as a sequence of compressed descriptions. The compression basis is the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) — a real-valued basis of smooth periodic functions. The complex-valued wavefunction of quantum mechanics is the natural generalisation: it is the simplest continuous, smooth, periodic codec for a universe whose configurations vary in both amplitude and phase.

Under this interpretation, particles fall into two classes that correspond directly to the two components of a compressed video:

Fermions are pixels: discrete, localised, non-overlapping by construction. Two pixels cannot occupy the same site — not by postulate, but because a pixel is a site. Pauli exclusion is a pixel axiom.
Bosons are compression residuals: the off-diagonal entries of the density matrix ρ = |ψ⟩⟨ψ| that remain after the per-site (fermionic) diagonal is removed. They are what the codec records when a fermion moves.

The actual causal chain is:

wavefunction (codec ) B−o−r−n− ru−le−−sa−m−p−lin−g→ fermion configurations (pixel frames)

An observer who sees only the pixel outputs, not the codec, invents a story:

fermion “−v−ir−t−ua−l− b−os−on−−e−xc−h−an−g−e”→ fermion.

The boson is a compression residual made into a noun. It is not wrong as an effective description, but it is not fundamental. In MPEG, macroblocks do not exchange anything; the DCT coefficients just are what they are. If one watched only the decoded pixels and tried to explain their correlations without knowing about DCT, one would invent something that looks exactly like boson exchange.

The seven experiments in this paper test whether this picture is self-consistent and quantitatively correct.

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