Predictions and kill conditions

The predictions table is the Broken-Born program’s list of observations that could kill it. Each row names an observable, what standard physics expects of it, what the program requires, and the result that would end the claim; checkpoint #11 introduces its table with “A theory is its list of ways to die.” The current table, #11 §13, has eleven rows: the self-interaction of dark matter (rows 1–3), dark energy and the fate of the expansion (4–5), the graviton (6), three permanent nulls, effects that the program says no search will ever find (7–9), the early universe (10) and the nature of dark matter (11). Not every row can kill: rows 3 and 11 are diagnostics that sort dark matter into one branch or another, row 5 is long-horizon, and row 10 bounds free parameters. Each row has a page here that states the test; the derivations behind the rows live in the sections on the physics they test. Three earlier predictions have been withdrawn with cause, and the dark-energy row is under real pressure from current data.

Stands: row 1, the knee, row 2, isotropy, row 3, the island discriminant, row 4, dark energy (under real pressure), row 5, the fate of the expansion (premise unresolved), row 6, the massless graviton, row 7, the direct-detection null, row 8, the monopole null, row 9, photon dispersion, row 10, the early step in G_eff · Died: no page in this section; withdrawn with cause, with obituaries beside the claims they tested: old row 3, velocity-space granularity, old row 4, Fornax friction suppression, superheavy-soliton dark matter · Open: row 11, particles or condensate (OP9) · Superseded: folded on the row pages: the v0.1 cliff, the exponential and the cube, DESI read as support, “after V(τ) < 0”, row 6 as “not previously posed”, earlier forms of row 7, v0.1’s spectral step and ±0.03 target, the three-way question, the parameter count · Popsci-only: “constant is impossible”, folded on row 4

Map#

Every row page states a claim of the program: the row as #11 writes it, the observable, the standard expectation, the requirement and the derivation pages that produce it, what kills it, and the data situation as the sources describe it. The established physics a test relies on has its own pages in the sector sections, linked from each row. The rows are not machine-checked: the verify/ scripts check derivations, not predictions. No measurement in the sources has decided a row, though current data bear on several, row 4 most of all. #11 §15 names rows 1, 4 and 7 as the program’s near-term falsification exposure, and rows 3 and 11 as “predictions not previously posed”.

• History of the predictions table comes first because the row numbers changed. It traces the table from the lab notebook’s ten rows (v0.1) through the ten of v1 to the eleven of #11: the two clumping rows withdrawn after Debt 3 and the island discriminant that replaced them, the softening of row 1 from a cliff to a knee, the graviton row added after Debt 1, #11 v2.0’s three-candidate rows and their revision in v2.1 after the soliton candidate was retired, the details dropped along the way, and the lab notebook’s per-sector parameter count, now superseded. Read it before citing a row number from an older document.

Rows 1–3 test the gated self-interaction of conjugate matter, the law σ_T(v) = σ₀F(v²/v*²) of #11 §8, in which σ_T is the transfer cross-section.

• Row 1: the knee in σ_T(v) requires strong self-scattering in slow systems, none in clusters for particle χ, and a knee at v* ~ 10² km/s, against cold dark matter’s zero and the power law of light-mediator models. It is killed by robust self-interaction far above v* or by a knee excluded in the 150–400 km/s band. The page follows the derivation through the amplitude, the gate mechanism, the scattering law and the benchmark, points to flag 17 on a factor of √2 in v*, and keeps the lab notebook’s exponential cliff as a superseded section. No source records a measurement that tests the knee.
• Row 2: isotropic scattering below the gate requires collisions slower than v* to scatter equally in all directions, unlike the forward-peaked scattering of light-mediator models, because the gate depends on the collision’s speed and not its angle. The argument assumes a heavy mediator and holds for particle χ; the kill condition, halo morphology that demands forward peaking, is stated without a quantity or a dataset.
• Row 3: the island discriminant reads the knee’s tail to tell particle dark matter from wave dark matter: a sharp cutoff for particles, a (v*/σ)⁴ power law from the gated condensation rate for waves. It came out of the calculation that killed velocity clumping, selects a branch rather than killing, and has an open particle side, since the gate’s tail is open problem 4 of #11 §14.

Rows 4 and 5 test the dark-energy field τ of cosmology.

• Row 4: thawing dark energy, never phantom is the program’s nearest trial. τ, hilltop quintessence on the Maslov circle, must thaw (w₀ > −1, wₐ < 0) and never fall below w = −1. A constant w = −1 in Data Release 3 (DR3) of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) or later kills the τ sector, and a robust intrinsic w < −1 kills the framework. DESI’s Data Release 2 (DR2) favours a phantom crossing above z ≈ 0.4, so the sector is under real pressure ahead of DR3; the page sets out the two points on which it survives.
• Row 5: the fate of the expansion identifies a future turnaround of our expansion with the conjugate universe’s bounce, through the constraint a·ã = 1. It is long-horizon, with row 4 as its near-term test, and its premise is unresolved: the turnaround needs V(τ) < 0, while the potential as written, V₀[1 + cos(τ/f)], has minimum zero (flag 27 in review/wiki-build-flags.md).

Row 6: the exactly massless graviton tests the spectrum of gravity and the momentum graviton: the reciprocity-even spin-2 combination is exactly massless, so bounds on the graviton mass from gravitational waves apply to it and are met identically, while the reciprocity-odd X is massive and short-range. The parity assumes reciprocity acts as the exchange of the two spin-2 frames; on #11 §6’s other action, Z → −Z⁻¹, see flag 39 in review/wiki-build-flags.md.

Rows 7–9 are permanent nulls.

• Row 7: a permanent null in direct detection follows from strict sector separation, postulate P4 taken strictly since v2.1: neither remaining candidate couples to Standard Model matter except through gravity. Any confirmed non-gravitational coupling kills it.
• Row 8: no monopoles of our sector keeps a null whose original rationale died in the monopole audit, with Berry-curvature monopoles in crystals as the only laboratory analog.
• Row 9: no linear photon dispersion requires the linear-in-energy correction to the speed of light to vanish exactly, protected by the residual symmetry ρ²; the protection argument exists only in the lab notebook.

Row 10: an early step in G_eff records two optional early-universe imprints of the dual gravitational sector, an a⁻⁶ step in the effective strength of gravity and negative dark radiation from a closed dual space; their sizes are free parameters, so data bound them rather than kill the program.

Row 11: particles or condensate comes last because it uses rows 1–3: telling the two remaining dark-sector candidates apart is open problem 9 of #11 §14.

The current table#

#11 §13 in full, in its own words. Abbreviations: cold dark matter (CDM); self-interacting dark matter (SIDM); general relativity (GR); quantum gravity (QG); weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP); Standard Model (SM); dark matter (DM); DESI’s Data Release 3 (DR3); the cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment CMB-S4, whose current status is unchecked (flag 32 in review/wiki-build-flags.md).

Withdrawn with cause#

#11 §13: “Withdrawn with cause: velocity-space granularity in halos; Fornax friction suppression (obituary §9); superheavy-soliton dark matter (obituary §12).” Each has its obituary beside the claim it tested, and all three are indexed in the graveyard.

• Velocity-space granularity in halos, old row 3: Obituary: velocity-space granularity in halos (old row 3).
• Fornax friction suppression, old row 4: Obituary: Fornax friction suppression (old row 4).
• Superheavy-soliton dark matter, withdrawn in #11 v2.1: Obituary: superheavy conjugate solitons.

Boundaries#

• The derivation behind each row lives in its sector: rows 1–3 in conjugate matter and the velocity gate and momentum clumping; rows 4 and 5 in dark energy and scale-factor duality; row 6 in the momentum graviton X; row 7 in P4: polarized matter and strict sector separation; row 8 in electric–magnetic duality and charge lattices; row 9’s residual symmetry ρ² in the order parameter, with #13’s reading of the row in conjugate special relativity; row 10 in scale-factor duality and early-universe cosmology; row 11 in dark-sector candidates.
• The established physics behind the tests: self-interacting dark matter for rows 1–2, wave kinetics for row 3, and the DESI survey, quintessence and the phantom divide for rows 4–5.
• Withdrawn predictions keep their obituaries with the claims they tested, indexed in the graveyard. Open problem 9 is also listed in open problems and the queue.
• Predictions about the program’s own work are not observational tests and live elsewhere: the pre-registered verdicts of blind review are in pre-registration, and the toy models’ pre-registered predictions are in success criteria S0–S5.
• What the table’s state says about the program as a whole is in Assessment: a live research program.