Physics World Models for Computational Imaging: A Universal Physics-Information Law for Recoverability, Carrier Noise, and Operator Mismatch

Computational imaging systems routinely fail in practice because the assumed forward model diverges from the true physics, yet no existing framework systematically diagnoses why reconstruction degrades. We introduce Physics World Models (PWM), a universal diagnostic and correction framework grounded in the Triad Law: every imaging failure decomposes into exactly three root causes — recoverability loss (Gate 1), carrier-noise budget violation (Gate 2), and operator mismatch (Gate 3). PWM compiles 64 modalities spanning five physical carriers (photons, electrons, spins, acoustic waves, and particles) into a unified OperatorGraph intermediate representation comprising 89 validated operator templates. Autonomous, deterministic agents diagnose the dominant failure gate and correct the forward model without retraining any reconstruction algorithm. Across 7 distinct modalities (9 correction configurations, including two CASSI algorithms and the Matrix baseline; 16 registered), correction yields improvements ranging from +0.54 dB to +48.25 dB. Gate 3 is identified as the dominant bottleneck in every validated modality, demonstrating that a decade of solver-centric progress has overlooked the principal source of imaging failure. The Triad Law provides the first universal, quantitative language for imaging diagnosis.