Documents on The Broken-Born program

CLAUDE.md and the README

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The root CLAUDE.md is the repository’s file of standing instructions for Claude Code sessions. It says what the program is, maps the documents to their folders, records what has changed since the program moved from claude.ai, defines the gate that must pass before work is called finished, and sets the method and the working arrangement with Paul. Its section “Since the handoff” is the most current statement of the program’s status, and it ranks first when the documents disagree. The README is the repository’s one-line description from its first commit, and what it says about the project is out of date.

The handoff document

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

HANDOFF.md is the note that carried the program from the claude.ai conversation where it was developed to Claude Code and this repository. It was prepared on 2026-10-19 so that a fresh session could continue without the original chat: it gives the scientific state on one screen, numbers the artifacts #1–#15, lists the results that exist only in the chat, and records the method, the review history, the working conventions and a ranked list of next actions. Much of it still stands, including its list of dead claims, which stays binding. Its soliton dark-matter candidate and its work queue were superseded on 2026-10-19, the queue that replaced it was revised again on 2026-10-19 and 2026-10-20, several of its statuses have moved on, and the root CLAUDE.md and checkpoint #11 now rank above it.

The lab notebook (#1) and its addenda

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The lab notebook, artifact #1, is the program’s first formal write-up: version 0.1, dated September 2026, with five postulates, an action, checks against established physics, a predictions table with kill conditions, and a ranked list of open problems. As the first calculations came in, their results were appended as addenda v0.2 to v0.6 rather than edited into the text, so the notebook preserves the order in which the program changed. Because the body was never revised, claims that later died, momentum-space clumping among them, still read there as live, and the original form of postulate P2, which the first Debt-1 calculation overturned, still stands among its postulates. The notebook was consolidated into the program v1.0 (#9), superseded as a reference by checkpoint #11, and is kept as the audit trail.

The Debt-3 calc notes (#2–#4)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Debt-3 calc notes are three short working notes, artifacts #2 to #4, that tested the program’s founding image: dark matter clumping by velocity rather than in space. The first showed that dark matter made of particles cannot clump this way. The second found that dark matter light enough to behave as a wave can, but only as an option, except in one scenario where clumping becomes compulsory in the smallest galaxies. The third showed that this scenario would have drained those galaxies of their dark matter, which observation rules out. Together they closed Debt 3 with a negative result, which checkpoint #11 now reports as an obituary. The notes are final for their own scope; no script in the gate checks their numbers.

The Debt-1 calc notes (#5–#8)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Debt-1 calc notes are four working notes, artifacts #5 to #8, on the most severe of the lab notebook’s open problems: what equations govern the geometry of momentum space. The first, written overnight, showed that the original postulates left the program with no content beyond general relativity and one model of self-interacting dark matter, repaired them, and gathered the geometry into a single modular field; on the way it found the mechanism of the velocity gate. The second showed that the field carrying momentum-space geometry must be a second graviton, and a massive one. The third tested whether that field avoids the Boulware–Deser ghost, the instability that generic massive-graviton theories carry, and found that it does when the field’s potential is written in frame variables, sets of local reference axes from which a metric is assembled; written in metric variables it fails, and the note argues that the frame formulation is the natural one. The fourth used Born reciprocity to constrain the remaining coefficients, leaving two free parameters, and to cancel the sector’s vacuum energy. Together they closed Debt 1 in structure; their results are now stated in checkpoint #11 §5–§8, and the battery checks their explicit algebra.

The checkpoint: #9 to #11 v2.2

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The checkpoint is the program’s paper-length statement of everything it has derived, predicted, retracted and left open, with every claim tagged by where it came from. Its first version, #9 (“The Broken-Born Program” v1.0), consolidated the lab notebook and the calc notes into one document with a plain-language passage opening every section. Its successor, #11, is the current reference for the full program. Version 2.0 added a methodological preface with a machine-verification battery, sections on charge lattices and on the dark-sector candidates, a reference list and an audit of the founding ideas; version 2.1 recorded the outcome of review round 3, retiring the soliton candidate and putting the dark-energy prediction under pressure; version 2.2 recorded the toy-model results. #11 is a working checkpoint, not to be submitted until its citations from memory have been checked against their sources.

The popular articles (#10, #12)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The popular articles are two plain-language essays about the program, written on claude.ai for general readers. “The Angle of the Mirror” (#10) is a field report on the first week: the bet that Born’s symmetry between position and momentum is exact but hidden, the two founding ideas the calculations killed, and the structure that survived. “The Universe’s Other Half” (#12) is a tour of the whole framework written, in its own opening words, “as if it were confirmed. It is not.” Neither has been revised since the import into this repository, so both still present the superheavy soliton candidate as alive and read the dark-energy data more favorably than the checkpoint now does, and #12 adds claims that no other document makes. They are kept for their exposition, and neither is ever a source for a claim’s status.

Conflicts between sources

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The program’s documents were written over several weeks, and the later ones correct, re-tag or retire what the earlier ones said, so the same question can get different answers in different files. This page collects those disagreements between documents, and between two statements of the same document. Most are settled by a fixed order of precedence in which the most current document wins. The rest are cases where documents of equal standing disagree, or where no document addresses the point; for those the wiki reports both readings and does not choose. Suspected errors inside a single statement, such as a slip in a formula or a wrong section pointer, are listed separately for Paul’s ruling.