We introduce Wave–PDE Nets, a neural architecture whose elementary operation is a differentiable simulation of the second-order wave equation. Each layer propagates its hidden state as a continuous field through a medium with trainable spatial velocity \(c(\textbf{x})\) and damping \(\gamma (\textbf{x})\) . A symplectic spectral solver based on FFTs realises this propagation in \(\mathcal {O}(n\log n)\) time. This oscillatory, global mechanism provides a powerful alternative to attention and first-order state-space models. We prove that a single Wave-PDE layer is a universal approximator. On language and vision benchmarks, Wave-PDE Nets match or exceed Transformer performance while demonstrating superior practical efficiency, reducing wall-clock time by up to 30% and peak memory by 25%. Ablation studies confirm the critical role of symplectic integration and a spectral Laplacian for stability and performance. Visualizations of the learned physical parameters reveal that the model learns intuitive strategies for information propagation. These results position Wave-PDE Nets as a computationally efficient and robust architecture with a strong physical inductive bias.