The research program

The Broken-Born program (BBT) is a speculative research program in theoretical physics, developed by Paul (P.R.) with Claude (Anthropic) since September 2026. It starts from Born reciprocity, the exchange of position and momentum. Quantum mechanics relates a state’s position description to its momentum description as a waveform to its spectrum, and the exchange, with one change of sign, leaves the rules of quantum kinematics, which fix how position and momentum relate before any forces are specified, exactly unchanged. The program takes the exchange to be an exact symmetry of the laws that the vacuum, the universe’s lowest-energy state, breaks spontaneously. A cooled magnet is the standard picture: the laws governing its atoms single out no direction, but its magnetized state points in one. The program follows the consequences for gravity, dark matter and dark energy. Its calculations killed its founding image, dark matter clumping in velocity rather than in space, and after a later review it retired a third dark-matter candidate, superheavy solitons, configurations of a hidden force field that cannot unwind. Two candidates remain: particles of conjugate matter, the counterpart of ordinary matter organized around momentum, and a condensate, a coherent oscillation of the momentum graviton, a second, massive gravitational field. In the project’s own words its status is a Lakatosian research program, not a theory: in the philosopher Imre Lakatos’s account, a body of work built around a fixed core assumption and judged by whether its revisions lead to new predictions, some of them confirmed.

Stands: Born’s question (established physics), the hard core (intact, twice sharpened), postulates P1–P5, the conjugate universe as a second description of one state · Died: no page in this section; the founding suppositions that died have their obituaries elsewhere: velocity clumping, monopoles as the explanation of their non-detection and conjugate collapse powering our expansion (all in the graveyard) · Open: no page in this section; the hard core’s open ends are the origin of the ρ-preserving potential and forced locality, and the three problems the word “theory” waits on are listed on the assessment (all in open problems) · Superseded: the original P2, replaced by P2′; the v1 assessment · Conjectures: two popsci-only items, the other observers and “a single assumption” (both in conjectures)

Map#

The section follows the frame of checkpoint #11 (papers/broken-born-checkpoint-v2.md): its two abstracts (§1), the question (§3), the postulates (§4–§5), the assessment (§15) and the audit of founding suppositions (Appendix A). The home page gives #11’s technical abstract with its tags. Born’s question is established physics; everything after it is the program’s own claim or its own record. The repository’s one-line README (“Physics hypothesis explaining dark matter and missing magnetic monopoles”) is out of date (see flag 37 in review/wiki-build-flags.md): the monopole explanation is dead, and both remaining dark-matter candidates are open.

  • Born’s question comes first because the program is an answer to it. Quantum kinematics is unchanged when position and momentum are exchanged, yet the form of the Hamiltonian, the locality of interactions, the mass shell and general relativity’s flat momentum fibers all favour position. The page sets out the symmetry, where the asymmetry lives, the earlier work on the question, and how far the program’s answer reaches.
  • The hard core is the program’s protected assumption, its answer to the question: Born reciprocity is exact and spontaneously broken, only the symplectic form ω is rigid, and the neutral metric η is the order parameter. The page explains the structures ω, η and H, why only ω is rigid, what is the program’s own, the toy models’ v2.2 refinement (a Goldstone angle that needs a potential, and a twisted element that leaves the breaking without physical effect unless matter couples to the sign of the order parameter), the statement’s history and its open ends. It stands, tagged [P].
  • Postulates P1–P5 state the hard core as five axioms. The section includes the original P2, which proved too rigid, and the nontriviality theorem that forced its replacement by P2′.
  • The conjugate universe follows the postulates because it is their reading of the founding picture of a second universe. In the current program it is the same state described in momentum variables, tied to ours by the constraint a·ã = 1 and the duality dictionary, with the far-future turnaround as one event in two descriptions.
  • Founding suppositions and their fates is a record: the eleven suppositions P.R. brought to the program, each with the fate #11 Appendix A assigns it and the calculation or argument that decided it, from “the hard core” to “dead twice”.
  • The ‘framework does no work’ critique is the referees’ main objection, stated most fully in review round 3 against the withdrawn soliton manuscript: nothing numerical in it depended on Born reciprocity. It is why the program retired the candidate rather than claim its low-mass version, prior art that does not depend on the framework, and it set the toy models as the next task; they meet the referees’ wording but answer the objection only in part.
  • Assessment: a live research program closes the section with #11 §15’s Lakatosian self-assessment: the hard core intact and twice sharpened, the progressive signs and the degeneration risks, the near-term falsification rows 1, 4 and 7, and the open problems the word “theory” waits on.

Boundaries#

Born's question Forward