Method on The Broken-Born program

Lakatos's methodology of research programmes

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

Lakatos’s methodology of scientific research programmes is an account, from the philosophy of science, of how a body of scientific work is judged over time rather than one hypothesis at a time. A programme keeps a hard core of assumptions fixed and surrounds it with auxiliary hypotheses that are revised when predictions fail. It counts as progressive while its revisions lead to new predictions, some of which are then confirmed, and as degenerating while its revisions only absorb failures after the fact. The Broken-Born program describes its own status in these terms, “a Lakatosian research program, not a theory”, and checkpoint #11 closes with an assessment sorted into hard core, progressive signs, degeneration risks and falsification exposure.

The collaboration: roles, attribution and conventions

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

The Broken-Born program is the work of two parties: Paul (P.R.), an independent developer, and Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. Paul supplies conjectures and direction and holds a veto; Claude supplies derivations, counterexamples, verification and drafting, and the papers carry an attribution line that records this split. Paul cannot independently verify most of the technical physics, so the provenance tags, the machine checks and the review forecasts written down in advance are his means of telling sound results from confabulation. The same conventions fix how decisions are taken and delegated, how work is divided into chunks that a new session can resume, and how the science is written.

Provenance tags and citation marks

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

Provenance tags are the bracketed labels that the program’s papers attach to every claim to say where it comes from: [D] derived in the program, [T] taken from the established literature, [P] postulated, [O] open, or [V] checked by machine. Citations carry a second mark: [S] if the reference was retrieved by a live search during the project, † if it was recalled from the model’s memory and still has to be checked against the source. The tags let a reader who cannot check the physics see what kind of support each statement has, and they change only when the support changes. The wiki copies them exactly as the sources attach them and never upgrades one.

Claim tiers and selection bias

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

The claim tiers are checkpoint #11’s ranking of its own statements by how much trust each deserves. Tier 1 is explicit algebra checked by machine; Tier 2 is established literature, correct at the level of well-worn results; Tier 3 is the program’s new structural physics, which #11 rates as plausible, at a prior of ~50–80% per claim pending expert review. Within Tier 3, #11 counts its negative results as the most reliable items. Alongside the tiers it names one specific risk, the selection-versus-derivation bias, which the wiki reads as presenting a structure that was chosen from the known consistent options as though the program’s premises had forced it. The tiers and the bias check are part of #11’s methodological preface, §2.

Open: the † literature battery (OP10)

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

The literature battery is the planned check of every reference that the program’s papers cite from model memory, marked †, against the published source. A † citation was recalled by Claude rather than retrieved, so its authors, title, journal reference, or the statement it is cited for may be wrong. Checkpoint #11 lists the battery as open problem 10 of its §14 and calls itself “not for submission until the † audit (open item 10) completes”. Some of the works involved have been checked in other contexts, and one suspected error in #11’s list has been flagged, but no complete battery is on record. It is part of the first item of the current work queue.

Negative results and dead claims

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

The program’s rule on negative results is that a claim killed by calculation or by review is reported in an obituary of its own and is not revived. Checkpoint #11 ranks such negative results as the most reliable of its new structural results. The founding image of the program, dark matter clumping in velocity rather than in space, is one of the dead claims, and so is a later dark-matter candidate, superheavy solitons of a hidden gauge sector. The wiki gives every dead claim its own obituary page and lists them all in the graveyard.