The Vacuum as a Maximally Symmetric Ground State: Measurement, Coupling, and the Observable Sector of Physical Reality

This manuscript is currently under review at Foundations of Physics. This paper is part of a research program proposing that the cosmological constant arises not from total vacuum energy but from the finite-domain residual to which gravity actually couples. This paper develops the first component of a research program examining the consequences of finite-domain vacuum energy for the cosmological constant problem. Physical observation is fundamentally constrained by coupling. All measurement systems possess finite bandwidth, finite sensitivity, and specific interaction channels, ensuring that only a restricted subset of underlying degrees of freedom becomes accessible to observation. This paper develops a…