Vacuum Energy from Temporal Integration A Schrödinger-Template Resolution of the Cosmological Constant

This paper is under revision. Subsequent research - Dissolving the Yang-Mills Mass Gap Through Quantized Decoherence - has necessitated revision of material developed here. The foundational claim of this framework, the primacy of information and time's arrow, stands unaffected. An updated version will follow.The cosmological constant problem is often described as the worst theoretical prediction in physics: quantum field theory yields a vacuum energy density of ρ_vac ∼ 10^76 GeV^4, while observations give ρ_obs ∼ 10^-47 GeV^4, a discrepancy of 10^123. We show that the Schrödinger equation's first-order temporal structure demands that vacuum energy be computed through temporal, not spatial, integration. When this correction is applied, the observed vacuum energy density emerges naturally with a single parameter determined from observation - paralleling Planck's determination of h from blackbody data. This approach reframes vacuum energy as the cost of continuous spatial emergence along time's arrow, rather than energy contained within pre-existing spatial volume. The resulting expression matches observation, and yields clear experimental predictions and falsification criteria.