Incoprea Research

Original Theories Volume II · science index

23 retained entries from the original 24. Original entry numbers are preserved. These are working hypotheses, not findings or proofs.

Astronomy & Planetary Science

• Theory 11 · The Belt Records One Catastrophe
  The main asteroid belt size-frequency distribution is the fossil of a single catastrophic disruption rather than a steady collisional cascade, so the knee in the distribution marks one event and all families near it share an age.
• Theory 10 · Obliquity Bimodality Is a Binary Signature
  The bimodal spin-orbit distribution of hot Jupiters is set by whether the host star has a binary companion: a companion truncates the disk and forces high-eccentricity migration, producing misalignment, while single stars migrate in the disk and stay aligned.
• Theory 12 · The Radius Valley Is a Fossil of Timing
  The radius valley is not a steady-state feature of atmospheric stripping but a fossil of when photoevaporation happened relative to disk dispersal, so its position and depth should change with stellar age.

Chemistry & Reaction Networks

• Theory 08 · Chirality Amplifies at the Wet-Dry Interface
  Large enantiomeric excess is produced by repeated dissolution and crystallisation cycles rather than by asymmetric synthesis, so the excess should scale with the square root of the number of wet-dry cycles a setting has experienced.
• Theory 07 · Life Is a Percolation Threshold
  The origin of life is a percolation transition in chemical reaction networks: what matters is molecular diversity and reaction probability, not any particular chemistry, so there should be a critical diversity above which self-sustaining autocatalysis appears.
• Theory 09 · Water's Second Critical Point Tunes Proteins
  The liquid-liquid critical point of supercooled water sets protein hydration: the anomalous heat capacity of unfolding should peak near the critical temperature and shift with osmolytes in lockstep with the critical point.

Mathematics & Computation

• Theory 22 · The Energy Floor Is Data Movement
  The energy cost of computation is set by the bytes moved per operation across the memory hierarchy rather than by arithmetic, so the practical floor is a joules-per-bit curve and efficiency gains come from moving fewer bits, not from doing fewer operations.
• Theory 23 · Floating-Point Error Has a Phase Transition
  Error in large reductions switches from benign to catastrophic at a critical reduction depth rather than growing smoothly, so reproducibility is a threshold property and the threshold shifts predictably with precision and ordering.
• Theory 24 · Theorem Difficulty Is Definition Count
  The difficulty of formalising a theorem scales with the number of independent definitions it must unify rather than with the length of its proof, so the de Bruijn factor is predictable from definition count before any formalisation is attempted.

Engineering & Materials Failure

• Theory 14 · Failure Is Percolation at Critical Defect Density
  Brittle failure occurs when defects percolate, so strength is governed by defect density and a universal exponent rather than by the single largest flaw, and the size effect should differ from the weakest-link prediction.
• Theory 13 · Fatigue Remembers in the Plastic Zone
  A fatigue crack's growth rate is set by the residual stress field stored in its plastic zone, which encodes the load history, so history can be read from diffraction and remaining life predicted without a path-dependent damage rule.
• Theory 15 · Load Factors Should Follow the Tail
  Safety factors should be calibrated to the tail index of the load distribution rather than to mean strength: a single partial factor that is adequate for a light-tailed load is systematically unsafe for a heavy-tailed one, and climate change is fattening the tails.

Psychology & Behaviour

• Theory 17 · Forgetting Has a Set Point
  Forgetting is regulated to a set point matched to the interference in an environment, so blocking it should improve recall of low-interference material and impair performance on high-interference material, in the same subjects.
• Theory 16 · Placebo Is Precision, Not Belief
  The size of a placebo response is set by the precision of the prior, not by the strength of the belief: manipulating the reliability of the cue changes the response, while changing the stated expectation at fixed reliability does not.

Virology & Immunity

• Theory 02 · Imprinting Is a Bet
  Original antigenic sin is not a defect but a bet: the immune system stores the first strain it meets as a prior on the distribution of future strains, so imprinting depth should scale with the strain diversity a cohort expects to encounter.
• Theory 01 · The Interferon Clock
  Disease severity is set by how late the interferon response arrives, not by how large it is: a late but massive response produces worse outcomes than an early moderate one, because the damage is done before it arrives and its arrival then recruits the cells that cause immunopathology.
• Theory 03 · The Virome Sets Immune Tone
  Chronic bacteriophage exposure calibrates mucosal immune tone, so virome diversity predicts allergic disease better than bacterial diversity does, and the hygiene effect is substantially a loss of phage exposure.

Agriculture & Food Systems

• Theory 20 · Nitrogen Loss Tracks Rainfall Intensity
  Nitrogen leaching is set by the intensity distribution of rainfall rather than by its total, so a wet year of gentle rain can lose less nitrogen than a drier year of storms, and a single event can carry a season's fertiliser below the root zone.
• Theory 21 · Pollinator Decline Is a Phenology Mismatch
  Pollinator declines are driven primarily by phenological mismatch with the plants they depend on rather than by pesticide load, so mismatch magnitude should predict decline rates better than toxicity, and restoring phenological diversity should reverse declines faster than reducing pesticides.
• Theory 19 · Yield Gaps Are Root Gaps
  The gap between potential and realised yield is set mainly by root architecture, specifically the distribution of roots with depth, rather than by nutrient supply, so deep-rooting varieties should close gaps that fertiliser cannot.

Ecology & Biodiversity

• Theory 05 · Range Edges Are Set by Competitor Noise
  Warm range edges are set by demographic stochasticity amplified by competition, not by thermal tolerance, so edge positions should track competitor density more closely than temperature and should move when competitors are removed without any warming.
• Theory 06 · The Seed Bank Is a Disturbance Clock
  Seed dormancy evolves to match the return time of disturbance, so seed longevity should scale inversely with disturbance frequency across habitats and shift within decades when disturbance regimes change.
• Theory 04 · Stability Is Response Diversity
  Ecosystem stability is set by response diversity, the variation in how species react to the same environmental driver, rather than by species richness; richness is a proxy that fails exactly when response diversity is low.

Index narrowed to the focused science collection. Biological and ecological population dynamics, genetics, physiology and engineering are retained. Source numbering remains historical; no remaining hypothesis has been promoted to a finding.