All the work presented in this paper would not have been possible without the invaluable references, most of which were freely accessible on the internet. Below, I list some of the key sources that guided the chronological development of the ideas presented:

1. I got reacquainted with the weirdness of electromagnetism through a Veritasium video and a resulting discussion.

2. Art Hobson's videos and paper, 'There are no particles only fields'.

3. C Torre's paper 'What is a photon?'

4. Mike Towler's introduction to pilot wave theory.

5. K.A. Milton and Silvan Schweber's accessible introduction to Julian Schwinger's work.

6. Prof. Kirk McDonald's web page was an invaluable resource for all things physics and where I frequently spent my time to understand the concepts better.

7. Andrey Akhmeteli's two papers which made it possible for me to consider matter wave's origin could be electromagnetic.

8. Innumerable articles on cosmology by Ethan Siegel both from Forbes and Big think.

9. Paper by Tenev & Horstemeyer on solid mechanics perspective on space-time.

10. After finalizing the paper I came across work that I could have leveraged to develop mechanism for spin.