Structural Foundations of Timeline-Relative Quantum Collapse (TRQC)

Structural Foundations of Timeline-Relative Quantum Collapse presents a metric-free formulation of TRQC built from a discrete event ontology. The paper defines a nonempty set of events equipped with structural time ordering, an influence relation, primitive adjacency as locality, and a real collapse field. Classical behavior is not assumed to be universal. Instead, it is restricted to a projection domain defined by structural time validity, sufficient collapse roughness, and bounded structural shear. Observers are modeled as influence-forward chains of events, and structural aging is defined as accumulated stack depth along such chains, replacing metric proper time at the foundational level. An arrow of time is introduced through a layer-wise collapse brightness condition assumed to be nonincreasing in structural time. This work establishes the ontological and combinatorial primitives of TRQC without presupposing spacetime geometry, providing the conceptual foundation for its continuum Lorentzian realization. Official project website: https://trqctheory.org