The Synchronization Latency Principle: Geometric Coherence, Informational Audit, and the Emergence of Inertia and Mass

We formulate an operational hypothesis—the Synchronization Latency Principle—as a disciplined extension of an “Information Audit” viewpoint within a locality-preserving quantum cellular automaton (QCA) framework. The central claim is scoped in a referee-proof way: matter-like excitations are auditable images that are not certified at a single-site update, but only after an audit closes over a minimal local neighborhood. In three dimensions, a nearest-neighbor stencil suggests a (1 + 6) block of cardinality 7; under explicit circuit-locality and audit assumptions, we show a clean lower bound Daudit ≥ 7 on the micro-depth needed to incorporate all neighbor links into a joint certification. To strengthen the theory beyond narrative plausibility, we add: (i) an operational definition of copy time via hypothesis-testing distinguishability (Helstrom bound), (ii) a quantum-speed-limit style lower bound on τcopy via quantum Fisher information and an explicit “stiffness” parameter χ, (iii) a reproducibility / audit-trail protocol separating priors (calibration) from validation (comparison tables), and (iv) an explicit toy construction with a 7-layer gate schedule. We also separate particle masses (PDG), atomic/isotopic masses (NIST), and nuclear masses (AME-style conversion), with electron and electronic-binding corrections stated and numerically illustrated.