What Is Reality? Why a World Ready for Public Physical Inquiry Must Support Time, Light, Matter, and Gravity

Physics represents reality through states, observables, fields, spacetime geometry, dynamical laws, and probabilities. This paper asks a logically prior question: what makes a mathematically specifiable structure count as an internally intelligible physical world rather than an object described entirely from outside? It constructs the minimal future-sufficient carrier obtained by identifying histories that no admitted continuation and independently calibrated reader can distinguish. The Intelligibility–NIR Bridge Theorem then shows that internal future intelligibility requires non-identical restitution: a controlled difference must remain attributable to its source while making a distinguishable difference to what can happen next. Under four independently auditable readiness conditions, one World-NIR witness yields four preterminal roles: carried continuation, public frontier, recognisable closure, and endogenous common deformation. These are identified respectively as the antecedents of time, light, matter, and gravity. A tetradic tomography criterion states when these four readings are jointly complete and irredundant. Familiar physical structures and equations arise only after explicit terminal locks. A theory of everything is therefore recast as a minimal common factorisation of physical inquiry rather than as a single terminal equation.