The graveyard: dead claims

The graveyard is the register of the Broken-Born program’s dead claims: ideas the program put forward that its calculations, a blind review or an observation then killed. Each entry says what was claimed and what killed it, and links the claim’s obituary page and the calculation, review ruling or decision that settled it; dead items told inside other pages, and the predictions withdrawn from the program’s table, are listed with them. A claim recorded here is not revived.

Status: Record, a register current to 2026-10-20 — no tags of its own; each entry keeps the tags of its obituary page — every death was decided by the calculation, review ruling or recorded decision named in its entry, except the magnetic identification, a claim found only in a popular article (popsci-only), which no program document addresses and which the wiki records as dead because it conflicts with the record. The root CLAUDE.md rule applies: “Claims listed as dead in HANDOFF §2 stay dead.” How the program treats its dead claims is described under negative results and dead claims.

Dead claims by section#

One entry per obituary page, in the order of the wiki’s sections. Claimed says what the claim was; killed by names what decided its death and links the page that records it.

Spontaneous breaking of reciprocity#

• Obituary: the naive ρ-preserving potential. Claimed: the term −μ[Tr(K K_ref)]², which version 1 of the toy-model note added to model I so that its circle of vacua reduces to two vacua exchanged by ρ, the Born reciprocity map, and the breaking of reciprocity survives in 1+1 dimensions. Killed by: round-4 findings F1 and F2, both upheld. Once the metric H is dynamical the potential “is unbounded below in model I”, reaching “−8.9 × 10⁶ μ at boost parameter 4” (toy-model note §4), and the intended vacuum (1, K_ref) is a saddle, so the Monte Carlo had simulated a frozen-H reduction. Version 2 of the note replaced it on 2026-10-20 with the bounded potential V_b; verify/toy_coset.py checks the runaway and the saddle.

Dark matter: momentum clumping#

The founding image and the predictions built on it died in Debt 3, the calculations carried out in calc notes #2–#4 and summarized in #11 §9 and in the net theorem: velocity-space clumping is “forbidden (particles), fatal (committed wave), decorative (free wave)”. No verify/ script checks any Debt-3 number.

• Obituary: velocity clumping, the founding image. Claimed: a smooth dark-matter halo breaks up into a few streams of particles moving with nearly the same velocity, so that dark matter clumps in velocity rather than in position; founding supposition 3, “Matter clumps in momentum space”. Killed by: Debt 3, three ways (#11 §9). For particle dark matter the mean-field criterion “fails by 10²⁸–10³¹ at the scattering benchmark” [D]; on the wave island, the one branch in which clumping is mandatory, Scenario A, is falsified by the ultra-faint dwarf galaxies [D + T]; elsewhere clumping is “optional, never required”. #11 App. A item 3 records the supposition as “dead as dynamics”, and the handoff lists it as dead.
• Obituary: Scenario A and the ultra-faint-dwarf endpoint. Claimed: on the wave island, the gated attraction that condenses wave-like dark matter also makes the cores of dwarf galaxies; fitting the cores fixes its coupling, and condensation then becomes mandatory in the ultra-faint dwarf galaxies. Killed by: calc note #4 (Debt 3c). The condensates would pass their critical mass, collapse and drain the halo, and “Scenario A is falsified by the existence of ultra-faint dwarfs”. #11 §9 (ii), tagged [D + T], records the endpoint as “falsified by observed UFD density and longevity” (UFD: ultra-faint dwarf) and the escape to a much lighter mass as closed independently.
• Obituary: velocity-space granularity in halos (old row 3). Claimed: row 3 of the lab notebook’s predictions table and one of its three flagship discriminants: the dark matter of a relaxed halo such as the Milky Way’s is split into of order ten macro-streams of width about v*, whose gravity leaves correlated, long-wavelength perturbations along cold stellar streams (#1 §9). Killed by: the death of the founding image it rested on. Calc note #2 withdrew the row on the particle island, and calc note #4 on both: “Rows 3 and 4 of the predictions table are permanently withdrawn, on both islands.” #11 §13 lists “velocity-space granularity in halos” among the predictions withdrawn with cause.
• Obituary: Fornax friction suppression (old row 4). Claimed: row 4 of the notebook’s table: dynamical friction, the drag that makes a massive body sink toward the centre of a galaxy, is suppressed in condensed dwarf-galaxy cores, so the globular clusters of the Fornax dwarf galaxy stay put (#1 §9). Killed by: the condensed cores came from the same velocity-space condensation as the founding image, and Debt 3 removed them: “The Fornax mechanism goes with them” (calc note #4). #11 §13 lists “Fornax friction suppression (obituary §9)” among the predictions withdrawn with cause.

Dark matter: the soliton candidate#

Checkpoint #11 v2.0 offered a third dark-matter candidate, superheavy topological solitons of a hidden gauge sector, and the standalone manuscript #14 worked it out. Review round 3 graded #14 v3 C, and on 2026-10-19 round-3 Decision 2 retired the candidate; the manuscript was withdrawn the same day and kept as the audit trail in notes/knot-dark-matter-standalone.md. The candidate and the parts built only for it are dead. The rulings are on round-3 verdict and rulings, and the [V] numbers of the obituary are gated in verify/soliton_obituary.py (the soliton-obituary script).

• Obituary: superheavy conjugate solitons. Claimed: the dark matter is superheavy ’t Hooft–Polyakov monopoles of a hidden SU(2) → U(1) sector, stable because their field configuration cannot unwind, dark because no gauge force of ordinary matter acts on them, and with a mass fixed by the abundance with no free dilution; #14 v3’s benchmark was 3×10¹³ GeV. Killed by: the round-3 verdict, C, with which the adjudicator agreed. The count of monopoles had been normalized too low; counted correctly, the abundance closes at “M ≈ 2.9–4.4×10¹² GeV [V]”, and the benchmark “is overproduced by 2.1×10³–1.2×10⁴ [V]” (#11 §12). Decision 2 retired the candidate “as a program-native proposal” rather than restore its mass with a free dilution factor. The version that survives, with a symmetry-breaking scale v ≲ 100 PeV, is prior art (Murayama–Shu; Liveoak–Maharana–Wells) that does not depend on Born reciprocity (round-3 Decision 2).
• Obituary: the hidden SU(2) → U(1) proposal. Claimed: the dark sector is a hidden SU(2) gauge force broken to U(1) by an adjoint Higgs field, which leaves heavy W′± bosons, a massless hidden photon and the monopoles, plus a light fermion ψ added so that the W′± can decay; #14 identified this sector with the momentum-polarized half of the program’s matter. Killed by: retirement with the candidate (round-3 Decision 2). The model itself was not refuted: its minimal form is excluded by W′ overclosure, and its low-scale version is prior art (Murayama–Shu; Liveoak–Maharana–Wells) that does not depend on Born reciprocity (round-3 Decision 2).
• Obituary: the coupling α_d ≈ 34. Claimed: the hidden monopoles’ coupling has the value α_d ≈ 34, fixed three ways in turn. Killed by: round 1, for attempt 1, Dirac quantization against our photon; the handoff calls it the “round-1 reviewer’s valid kill: can’t use our DSZ lattice and then deny coupling to our photon” (HANDOFF.md §2), DSZ being the Dirac–Schwinger–Zwanziger charge lattice. The second form, reciprocity acting on the coupling as modular S, was round 2’s weakest link (“numerology”, HANDOFF.md §6) and was set aside; it is filed as superseded. Attempt 3, hypothesis H, was motivated rather than derived and died with #14 v3 (round-3 Decision 2). What survives is general: “A weakly coupled hidden sector always has strongly coupled monopoles, by Dirac quantization [T]” (#11 §12).
• Obituary: the Kibble normalization. Claimed: #14’s count of the monopoles formed at the hidden transition by the Kibble mechanism, the yield n/s = p (T_c/M_Pl)³, normalized at p = 1 in v2 and p ≈ 0.023 in v3, with p = 1 treated as the upper end. Killed by: round-3 ruling 1, upheld. v3’s value dropped the factor (1.66√g*)³, and one defect per Hubble volume gives “p ≈ 104 [V]” (#11 §12), gated in verify/soliton_obituary.py as p = 104.31. Ruling 3 added that this count is a floor, not a ceiling.
• Obituary: the √N topological floor (chat-only). Claimed: an argument made only in the claude.ai chat, that the Kibble mechanism leaves a net topological charge which annihilation cannot remove; in the handoff’s words, “this bounds the relic abundance between Kibble ceiling and √N floor” (HANDOFF.md §2). The handoff queued the calculation as its §8 item 3. Killed by: round-3 Decision 3: “Its premise, Kibble as a ceiling, is inverted (ruling 3)”, and “Under decision 2 it has no candidate left to serve.” Ruling 10 had also found annihilation at the monopoles’ strong coupling already worked out for hidden sectors. The argument was never written into a document, and no number belongs to it.
• Obituary: the ψ relic window. Claimed: #14 v3’s mass window for ψ, the light hidden fermion added so that the W′± could decay: light enough for ψ to be a minor part of the dark matter, heavy enough for it to have annihilated before nucleosynthesis. Killed by: ruling 4, upheld. v3 had left out ψ̄ and the second member of the doublet and bracketed an exactly known cross-section by up to a factor of ten; the recount [V] puts 10% of the dark matter at 45–49 GeV and all of it at 146–158 GeV, so “v3’s 0.1–0.3 TeV was wrong”. Ruling 6, accepted, not re-checked, moved the lower edge: ψ at MeV masses would still be freezing out during Big Bang nucleosynthesis.
• Obituary: Planck-suppressed adjoint mixing. Claimed: #14 v3’s estimate of the kinetic mixing ε between the hidden photon and ours, from a dimension-5 operator with an “O(1) coefficient at the Planck scale”. Killed by: ruling 7, upheld: the coefficient has no source, and “the literature generates it at one loop from bi-charged states, which sector separation forbids”. Ruling 8 found the operator itself in the literature. Decision 1 then took P4 strictly, with ε ≲ 10⁻¹³ from gravity alone.

Cosmology#

• Obituary: conjugate collapse powers our expansion. Claimed: the gravitational collapse of the conjugate universe drives the accelerating expansion of ours; founding supposition 9, “Their collapse is our acceleration”. Killed by: the data, then a derivation. The chat-era translation rule w_eff = −2 − w̃ required w = −2, which is falsified; the corrected duality dictionary, w_eff = −w̃, maps dual dust to dust and so removes the mechanism. The handoff: “first version gave w = −2 (falsified); corrected dictionary removed the mechanism (dual dust ↦ dust)” (its dead list); #11 App. A item 9: “dead twice”. The corrected dictionary is already in the lab notebook’s version 0.1 (notes/broken-born-theory.md §0, §6).

Electric–magnetic duality#

• Obituary: conjugate monopoles explain the null result. Claimed: magnetic monopoles exist but belong to the momentum-polarized half of physics, which is why no experiment has found one; the explanatory half of founding supposition 5. Killed by: #11’s monopole audit (§11.1, [D]): “the relevant duality is electric–magnetic (E↔B, g → 1/g), not x↔p, and inflationary dilution already accounts for absence [T]”. The handoff lists it as dead, “wrong duality; inflation suffices”. The other half of the supposition, conjugate monopoles as ontology, stands.
• Obituary: the magnetic identification (popsci-only). Claimed: only in the popular article “The Universe’s Other Half” (#12): “The momentum-polarized sector is the magnetic side of electromagnetism”, dark because Dirac’s condition makes its coupling strong, “about 34, against our 1/137”. Killed by: no ruling, since it was never a program claim. The wiki records it as dead because it conflicts with the dead α_d ≈ 34 via Dirac quantization against our photon, with P4 taken strictly (round-3 Decision 1), and with row 7, the permanent null in direct detection.

Dead items folded on other pages#

Some dead items have no obituary of their own, because they were parts of a larger dead claim, and some dead claims are retold where they bear on another topic. Each is told in a section of another page. The entries link that section, the obituary and the ruling.

Parts of the soliton candidate#

• The dark-matter candidacy of conjugate monopoles, in The candidacy, retired on the page of conjugate monopoles as ontology (alive). Claimed: conjugate-sector solitons are the dark matter, a candidate that would “slip through the Debt-3 loophole (§9)” (#11 §12); the handoff tied the surviving ontology to “the soliton candidate” (HANDOFF.md §2). Killed by: round 3 and Decision 2; #11 §11.1: “Their candidacy as the dark matter itself is retired in v2.1 (§12).” Obituary: superheavy conjugate solitons.
• The headline mass band, in What v3 had claimed on overproduction at the benchmark (alive). Claimed: #14 v3’s abstract put the monopole mass “at about 1e13 to 4e13 GeV with no dilution required”. Killed by: ruling 2, upheld: “The M* band and “no dilution” fail”. The corrected numbers stand on the same page [V]. Obituary: superheavy conjugate solitons.
• The gravitational-wave band of the hidden transition, in The gravitational-wave band (died with the candidate) on the hidden sector’s thermal history (record), and in The retired candidate’s hidden transition on gravitational waves from phase transitions (established). Claimed: if the hidden symmetry breaking were first order, it would leave a stochastic gravitational-wave background “with a present-day peak frequency of ~1e5 to 1e7 Hz” (#14 §4). Killed by: it was a prediction of the soliton candidate and died with it (round-3 Decision 2). Ruling 5 had already moved its upper end to 3.2×10⁷ Hz, and the round-3 referee had found a first-order transition inconsistent with #14’s own count of monopoles. Obituary: superheavy conjugate solitons.
• Two further claims of #14 v3. First, in Ruling 9 and the claim it contradicted on the Witten effect (established): “The decisive constraints therefore act on psi, not on the dark matter itself” (#14 §2). Ruling 9, accepted, not re-checked: with mixing and a physical hidden θ the monopoles carry a visible electric charge, which contradicts the claim whenever ε ≠ 0; Decision 1’s strict sector separation closed the channel. Second, in ruling 13 on the round-3 rulings (record): “All numerical statements in Secs. 2-4 were computed by executed code rather than by hand.” (#14 §6). The ruling upheld in substance that this overstates what the code showed: “The code checked the arithmetic of a wrong model.” The lesson became a rule of method, verification checks arithmetic, not the model. Obituary: superheavy conjugate solitons.

Dead claims retold on other pages#

• What died: collapse as the source of acceleration, on the conjugate universe (alive): founding supposition 9, killed by the falsified w = −2 and by the corrected dictionary (HANDOFF.md §2; #11 App. A item 9). Obituary: conjugate collapse powers our expansion.
• The rationale that died, on row 8, no monopoles of our sector (alive): the lab notebook first justified the null by “p-polarized solitons” (#1 §9, row 8), which rests on the monopole explanation that #11 §11.1’s audit killed. Obituary: conjugate monopoles explain the null result.
• The naive form, dead, on the open problem of where the ρ-preserving potential comes from: the naive potential, killed by round-4 findings F1 and F2. Obituary: the naive ρ-preserving potential.
• How the rows were withdrawn, on halo substructure (established): old rows 3 and 4, withdrawn by calc notes #2–#4. Obituaries: velocity-space granularity in halos and Fornax friction suppression.
• The retired soliton candidate, on the radiation era (established): the Kibble yield of ruling 1, the hidden sector’s dark radiation of ruling 5, and ψ’s freeze-out of ruling 6. Obituaries: the Kibble normalization and the ψ relic window.
• Why the mirror is not seen, on the magnetic mirror-family (established), whose subsection “Not the dead α_d ≈ 34” separates the dead hidden-sector coupling from the strong magnetic coupling of our own electromagnetism, which is established physics. Obituary: the coupling α_d ≈ 34.

Withdrawn predictions#

#11 §13 closes the predictions table with its withdrawals: “Withdrawn with cause: velocity-space granularity in halos; Fornax friction suppression (obituary §9); superheavy-soliton dark matter (obituary §12).” The predictions section lists the same three, and the history of the table records when each left it. One further prediction died before it reached a table.

The withdrawn manuscript’s own observational statements, such as the gravitational-wave band above, were never rows of the program’s table and fell with the manuscript.

How the deaths were decided#

The fates of all eleven founding suppositions are on founding suppositions and their fates, and the dates of the deaths since the move to this repository are on the timeline.

What is not listed here#

• Superseded statements. Earlier forms of surviving claims, replaced by corrected versions, such as the exponential cliff of the scattering law or the original P2, are in superseded statements. So is the second form of α_d, which was set aside rather than refuted.
• Negative results that stand. Exclusions the program derived and still holds are standing claims, listed in claims that stand: a massless X is excluded (why X must be massive), potentials built from metrics fail (the metric tier fails twice), the minimal hidden sector is excluded (W′ overclosure), the soliton benchmark is overproduced (overproduction at the benchmark), and the classical breaking in the complex toy model does not survive quantization (quantum restoration).
• The Debt-3 loophole. Topological localization of individual objects in momentum space “remains untested, but has no candidate” (#11 §12): Open: the topological loophole.
• Chat-only and popsci-only claims that are not dead are in conjectures. The two that are dead, the √N floor and the magnetic identification, are listed here.

Sources#

• CLAUDE.md “Since the handoff” — the soliton candidate dead as a program-native proposal, strict sector separation in force, the √N floor’s queue item dropped; “Method” — dead claims stay dead.
• HANDOFF.md §2 — the dead list at the move from claude.ai and the √N floor’s premise; §6 — round 1’s kill and round 2’s verdict on α_d.
• papers/broken-born-checkpoint-v2.md §9 — the Debt-3 obituary; §11.1 — the monopole audit and the retired candidacy; §12 — the soliton obituary and what survives; §13 — the withdrawn predictions; App. A — the fates of the founding suppositions.
• papers/reciprocity-toy-models.md §4 — the naive potential’s runaway and the saddle.
• review/round4-adjudication.md “Verdict”, “Rulings” F1–F2, “Revisions for v2 of the note” — the naive potential and its repair.
• review/round3-adjudication.md “Verdict”, “Rulings” 1–13, “Decisions” 1–3 — the verdict on #14 v3, the rulings behind each of its deaths, strict P4, the retirement and the dropped floor.
• notes/knot-dark-matter-standalone.md banner, Abstract, §2, §4, §6 — the withdrawal and the withdrawn claims: the mass band, the decisive constraints on ψ, the gravitational-wave band, the claim of executed code.
• notes/debt3a-stream-stability.md “Consequences for the predictions table”, notes/debt3b-wave-island.md “What pins g? Two scenarios”, notes/debt3c-ufd-endpoint.md “Verdict and closure of Debt 3” — the withdrawal of rows 3 and 4, the descendant signature, Scenario A falsified.
• notes/broken-born-theory.md §0, §6, §9 — the corrected dictionary; the original rows 3, 4 and 8.
• notes/broken-born-program-v1.md §9 — v1’s list of withdrawn rows.
• verify/soliton_obituary.py, verify/toy_coset.py — the gated numbers of the soliton obituary; the naive potential’s runaway and saddle.
• popsci/universes-other-half.md “Dark matter as the other polarization” — the magnetic identification.