Editing Openai/6897769e-4ee4-800f-aba5-69cca34f701c (section)

==== 1. Today’s photon backgrounds are insufficient by large margins. - Even if you could perfectly convert every photon in the CMB and a very optimistic estimate of all starlight into rest mass, you'd still come up short by factors of thousands. So a continuous present-day conversion process from these diffuse photons cannot explain the existing mass budget. ====
# Viable QAT routes remain, but they must be time-dependent or localized: - Early-Universe conversion: Photon energy densities were enormously higher in the early Universe (e.g., radiation-dominated era). If QAT-style photon→mass conversion took place efficiently during early epochs (reheating, phase transitions), then the required energy might have been available. This route makes QAT similar to models that tie mass/particles to early-universe processes. That path must then be checked against nucleosynthesis, CMB spectra, etc. - Efficient localized conversion / coherent processes: The toy estimates treat photons as diffuse. Coherent or resonant processes (high optical depth layers, plasmas, catastrophic phase transitions) could convert far more photon energy per interacting volume than diffuse backgrounds indicate. But you’d need to show such processes existed and at sufficient scale. - Photon recycling / binding energy accounting: If the "mass per mode" in Model 1 is not newly created but reflects reclassification of already bound EM energy (i.e., photons that were already in forms of bound energy), you avoid creating net mass now — you only change bookkeeping. That is conceptually simpler but then requires an initial epoch to set the bookkeeping.
# Conservation is doable but restrictive. - Conservation of energy demands that if mass has increased since early times, an equal amount of energy must have been taken from the photon sector (or some other sector) — so cosmological photon histories and observed spectra place direct constraints on any mass-production hypothesis.