DS moves like an open project: you propose a quantified change, debate it in the relevant working group, reach consensus, and each consensus produces a new version time-stamped by a Zenodo DOI. Nothing merges without passing the verification harness.
Five steps, each on an existing GitHub primitive. No infrastructure to reinvent: scientific versioning and DOI archiving are native.
An idea, a correction, a derivation. Clearly stated, tied to one aspect.
→ Discussion / Issue 02The working group for that aspect challenges, refines, or refutes.
→ Discussion category 03Any numerical claim must keep verify_v2_10.py green (40/40).
Maintainer review. Explicit agreement required before merge.
→ PR review 05Merge → release tag → new version DOI under the concept DOI.
→ Release + ZenodoThe model's aspects aren't invented for the occasion: they are the falsification targets and open problems already inventoried in the paper. Each group is a dedicated discussion category.
No horizon, no late-time thermal flux, no final burst. A single confirmed detection falsifies the model outright; a non-detection concludes nothing — this is a standing exposure, not a decidable test. Dark-matter window reopened below 10¹⁵ g.
Non-periodic post-merger echoes at geometrically growing spacing (tn+1 ≈ 3 tn), rederived on the Schwarzschild exterior — the earlier exponential-in-compactness law is superseded. Outside current quasi-periodic template searches. Zero breathing mode is binary but assumption-level: the scalar sector is constrained by fiat of the bootstrap.
Hard mass cutoff below M_crit ≈ 1.29 × 10⁶ M☉ ∝ ℓ₁² (log M_crit = 6.11), with the calibration-invariant exponent dN/dM ∝ (M_crit − M)−1/2. The thermal photosphere is no longer obligatory — a luminosity requirement only, pending the two-component interior calculation. Disfavoured: a direct dynamical mass in a lensed little red dot returns ≈ 5×10⁷ M☉, placing the prototype at log M ≈ 7.7, a factor ≈ 40 above the cutoff, and excluding Family 2 as an explanation of the little red dots — the pre-registered failure mode, recorded without mitigation. Counterweight: the present sample (n = 7 firm masses) cannot discriminate either way; the registered prediction is the operative test.
The δ = +4.63% deviation is withdrawn. Once the Deser bootstrap is taken to its endpoint the exterior of every compact object is Schwarzschild, so b_c = e·r_s belongs to the scalar profile alone and no shadow-diameter deviation is predicted. The category stays open for the archived debate.
The deepest debt: make the distributed RLC parameters emerge from a well-defined statistical mechanics of DQDs. Without it, DS stays a structured set of analogies.
The PLL invoked to give the substrate its coherence is so far a name imported from electronics, without governing equations — yet it underwrites lattice rigidity, the transparency clause χ_vac ≪ 1, and the nematic order behind axiom A7. The natural formalization is a distributed injection-locking / Kuramoto dynamics on the DQD gas. The difficulty is quantified: three single-cell computations of χ_vac all failed, and failed differently — one landing eighteen orders above the PVLAS bound, one twelve. Estimates disagreeing among themselves by six orders exclude a merely wrong constant; the suppression must be collective. The correctly posed question is whether the ordered gas has a finite coherence length ξ — no value for ξ exists anywhere in the model. Testable residue: any excess over Euler–Heisenberg must grow as the interaction volume shrinks at fixed field. PVLAS probes at L ~ cm, BIREF@HIBEF at L ~ µm; comparing the excess at two focusing scales does not require ξ to be known in advance.
The manuscript files this first among the open problems. Three readings all fail against table data: massless unfolded states are excluded by oscillations; the inductive micro-loop mass overshoots Σm_ν < 0.12 eV by ≥ 10⁶; the WKB-weighted effective mass still overshoots by ~300. One N_DS = 2 topology can host neither three flavours (N_ν = 2.984 ± 0.008, LEP) nor PMNS mixing. The candidate direction — the DQD opening amplitude as flavour coordinate — is filed Postulated and needs three things, not one: quantization to exactly three levels, an opening→mass law reproducing the Δm² ratio ≈ 33, and a mixing mechanism. Structural obstacle: the mechanism favoured in the Standard-Model literature makes neutrino masses small by being inversely proportional to a large scale, whereas every mechanism available here makes them directly proportional. The mismatch is one of sign in the exponent, not of magnitude, and no inversion mechanism is available.
Two dimensionless inputs of the particle sector are undetermined. The aspect ratio R₃/r ≈ 37.1, on which Z_e depends logarithmically — this is why Z_e is filed Calibrated rather than Derived, and why the model counts two inputs and not one. And the accumulated interface phase θ_tot of the single-valuedness condition, which fixes the offset of the radial mode ladder. Neither follows from the matching condition, which constrains D/r only.
The most self-contained item in the inventory. The mass law m ∝ N²Z, with m_p/m_e = 1836 and N_p/N_e = 9, requires Z_p/Z_e ≈ 22.7. A closed toroidal-helix geometry for the N = 27 soliton (9 turns of 3 strings, L ∝ N², C ∝ 1/N) gives Z_p/Z_e = N3/2 = 27 — within 19% of the required value, a residual of logarithmic order comparable to the ln(8R₃/r) corrections of the electron derivation. Closing that gap from an internal matching condition, without fitting, would make the proton mass geometric. Read it with the mass-scale obstruction: the target is a ratio, not an absolute mass — an impedance-matched vacuum is conformally invariant and has no intrinsic scale, so m_e is structurally an input, not something merely yet to be derived.
Read this before attempting any absolute mass. A vacuum that is purely electromagnetic and impedance-matched is conformally invariant and has no intrinsic scale. Four independent analyses converge: the equation of state P = u/3; the single-velocity character of the linear lattice; the zero-point sum over the braided defect, a pure ultraviolet term proportional to the cutoff; and the fact that the soliton-to-quantum mass ratio of a transmission line is fixed by its characteristic impedance alone — for a line of impedance Z the relevant coupling is Ze²/2ℏ, so a matched substrate gives 2πα and any soliton weighs O(1/α) times its own quantum, whatever non-linear constitutive relation is assumed. Strong coupling would need Z ≈ 174 Z₀, incompatible with the transparency of the vacuum. m_e is not “not yet derived”: it is structurally an input, exactly as the corresponding Yukawa coupling is an input of the Standard Model, and the electron reads as the quantum of the line rather than its soliton. What stays attainable is a spectrum of ratios given one scale. Caution: the characteristic impedance of a line (√(L/C)) and the impedance of the medium (√(μ/ε), which sets α) are distinct — coiling raises the former without raising the coupling, so no confinement-type strong-coupling regime is reachable by winding a line, only by changing the medium itself.
Conditional progress, obstruction retained. The telegrapher action fixes the compact-phase normalization conditionally: three strings with q = e/3, Z_s = Z₀ and fractional winding 1/3 give the logarithmic coefficient 3/4α. It fixes neither the logarithm, nor the core action, nor the required fractional monodromy, and no equation maps instanton fugacity to G. P = u/3 still makes the substrate scale-free.
The low-impedance corridor and its no-signaling narrative are withdrawn. The model has no state-space construction for entangled defects, no Born rule, no measurement map and no decoherence functional. A viable quantum extension must reproduce Bell correlations without an operational signaling channel, and derive a subsystem’s reduced-state dynamics from a specified microscopic action. These are constraints to be met, not phenomena the model explains. Scope: state space and measurement live here; the spectrum and single-band kinematics belong to the quantitative quantum sector.
The hydrogen-spectrum recovery is structural (E ∝ −1/(n*)²), not quantitative: the Rydberg constant is not derived from substrate parameters. The verdict is now split. The kinematic half has a partial answer — on the surrogate Johns lattice the envelope obeys the free Schrödinger equation as its single-band quadratic truncation, one action quantum closes both the de Broglie relations and the inertial response, and an external potential enters as in solid-state envelope theory, with a measured breakdown threshold. The dynamical half is the harder one and stays open. Two measured negative results bound the gap: the bound-band coupling between two braided defects falls off exponentially with separation, so the 1/r potential cannot originate there and must come from the charge sector; and the exact stationary states of the bare lattice carrying a point charge are anisotropic, the isotropic Coulomb field appearing only in the continuum limit, with violation measured to fall off as ≈ 1.4 ℓ₁/r. Scope: spectrum and kinematics here; the Born rule and measurement belong to the quantum-interpretation group. Closing ℓ_cell, on which Π_sat and ω_c depend, has its own group.
ℓ_cell(x) ≡ ν−1/3 is the local inter-cell spacing of the gas, a fluctuating field set by the local number density ν — itself a cosmological initial condition. It is not ℓ₁, which is the string constant fixed by the anchor R₃. The working hypothesis is that at statistical equilibrium at rest the two coincide, ℓ_cell ≈ ℓ₁, and that hypothesis is filed Postulated: the manuscript calls its derivation the missing brick. Conditional on it: the saturation field Π_sat, the cutoff frequency ω_c, the saturation coefficient — and hence the coefficient a = 1/Π_sat², which the status ledger lists under Derived only with that condition attached.
With the scalar sector constrained and the tensor sector bootstrapped to GR, the exterior is Schwarzschild and no deviation is predicted — but that bootstrap is asserted (Deser), not performed. The quadrupole formula, the polarization content and the GW luminosity all await that computation, and every surviving gravitational-wave claim rests on it. Second debt, new in V2.9: the interior is integrated with the scalar force law while the exterior is Schwarzschild, and at the surface of the critical configuration U = GM/Rc₀² ≈ 0.4, so the two descriptions differ there at second post-Newtonian order by O(1) coefficients. No matched interior–exterior solution has been constructed, and the substrate-star numbers are exposed to that uncertainty.
M_crit ≈ 1.29 × 10⁶ M☉ is the number the registered LRD prediction rests on, and it currently stands on one implementation. The hydrostatic integration treats momentum non-relativistically at compactness ~0.8; a covariant reformulation could shift M_crit. The second implementation has been re-run on the A8-consistent source; the first has not, and the two-implementation agreement stated in earlier versions refers to the superseded source.
The computed interior contains substrate only. An accreting Family-2 object also contains ordinary matter, and because the equilibrium substrate is transparent (Γ_bif = 0) it exerts no pressure on that matter, which falls to the centre and forms a separate compact core inside the substrate halo — the two density scales differ by ≳ 10⁹ and never meet. Three consequences are open. (i) The core gravitates through the same field Z and reshapes the substrate profile from inside; whether the stable branch and M_crit survive a central point mass of fraction f is a two-component hydrostatic calculation that has not been done, and its answer sets the maximum matter content compatible with the branch. (ii) The photosphere of an accreting object sits at the core, not at R — which is why the thermal signature is a luminosity constraint only; its spectral form requires (i). (iii) No unification of matter and substrate at the stellar level is possible here: the compact object is a diffuse state of the vacuum, not compressed matter.
The present sample — n = 7 firm masses — cannot discriminate, in either direction. Neither the “disfavoured” verdict on the LRD channel nor its reversal can be settled on it; the registered prediction is the operative test. The work with a home here is growing the firm-mass sample against the frozen criteria of that registration.
The model’s most decisive falsification channel asserts no late-time thermal flux and no final burst — but it does retain one emission, and that one is not computed. An asymptotically frozen collapse emits a transient Hawking-like flux during formation (Barceló–Liberati–Sonego–Visser class), and computing it requires curved-space quantum field theory beyond the present framework. Anyone designing the PBH test needs to know that a formation-epoch flux is predicted and cannot presently be calculated.
Whether they vanish is neither established nor excluded: the earlier statement α₁ = α₂ = 0 was downgraded from a claimed result to an open problem. The scalar action carries no explicit substrate 4-velocity, but the effective metric singles out a time direction through the field itself, and the boosted profile is an exact solution only of the linearised dynamics — its violation of the full field equation is of order χ², which the paper flags as not a priori negligible here. Deciding it needs a post-Newtonian computation with the substrate frame in motion relative to the system; that has not been done. Until then the model’s standing against the Einstein-aether bounds (α₁ < 10⁻⁴, α₂ < 10⁻⁷) is undetermined rather than clear.
The model is static; real compact objects spin. The vorticity field of the ansatz, which lowers the local impedance, is the natural frame-dragging analogue; a “Kerr analogue” — frozen collapse plus frozen vorticity — is the open construction. An ergosphere is what Blandford–Znajek jet launching would require, not a deliverable in itself: the jets themselves pose no conflict, being launched outside the photon sphere.
With charge carried by winding chirality, three consequences follow: the vacuum node being achiral (O_h-invariant scattering), net chirality is conserved and zero, so chiral solitons can only be created in mirror pairs; annihilation becomes mechanical, two mirror windings untwisting into the achiral vacuum; and spatial inversion exchanges the two winding senses, so parity acts as charge conjugation — the mirror image of an electron is a positron. But the charge itself is not carried by the connectivity of the network: a stationary state bearing net flux through a closed surface needs a genuine divergence source, and the braided defect provides none, with either handedness and at equal cost. If charge exists here it must reside in the constitutive content of the string, whose equation of state is unspecified. Declared debt: strict pair creation implies exact matter–antimatter symmetry at formation, making the observed baryon asymmetry an open problem of the framework, as it is of the Standard Model.
The primitive state is conjectured to be the defect-free cubic lattice; a quench during its condensation (Kibble–Zurek) would freeze in chiral loop defects by pairwise string reconnection — a mechanism producing closed chiral loops with a minimum circumference ~ ℓ₁, consistent with a discrete stable spectrum. Neither the quench nor the reconnection dynamics is derived: this records a research direction, not a result. Second question of the same sector: the behaviour of a fixed-ℓ₁ lattice under cosmological expansion. Cosmological evolution otherwise lies outside the model’s scope.
The chiral closure is dissolved: the Johns matrix is invariant under full point inversion and every mirror (O_h), so the scattering never receives the weave handedness as an input, and the ±½ signs come from the achiral vector-product algebra of constraint C3. Theorem 4 carries no residual chiral postulate. What stays open is the converse question — the geometric chirality of the weave is real but mute in the electromagnetic sector, confirmed on two independent fronts (achirality of the scattering matrix; the two mirror weaves degenerate in the electrostatics of a charged braided defect), and no mechanism gives it physical relevance where parity is not protected. Do not start from the obvious route: a Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya chiral term would be the natural carrier and would evade Derrick’s theorem (finite equilibrium size iff |B| ≥ √(3AC)), but stabilizing an object at the Compton scale that way needs a vacuum chirality of order unity there — excluded by bounds on the rotation of astrophysical polarization by more than thirty orders of magnitude. The muteness of the weave and the absence of stable three-dimensional solitons are one constraint, not two.
The model holds a strict epistemic posture, and it applies to contributions too. Disagreement is welcome; what isn't is an unverifiable claim presented as settled.
verify_v2_10.py stays at 40/40. Code ships with the prose. Be clear on what that gate is not: both implementations originate from the same collaboration, the first has not been re-run on the A8-consistent source, and no independent third-party verification has taken place. A green suite means the stated consequences follow from the encoded equations — nothing more.10.5281/zenodo.21196098. You always know who changed what, and when.One maintainer setup step. These links assume the repository is public with Discussions enabled and one category per group above (slugs: shadow-eht, gravitational-waves, lrd-jwst, pbh-evaporation, microscopic-derivation, phase-lock, neutrino-sector, aspect-ratio, proton-impedance, mass-scale, derivation-of-g, quantum-interpretation, quantum-sector, cell-spacing, strong-field-gravity, interior-treatment, two-component-interior, lrd-statistics, formation-flux, preferred-frame, rotation-kerr, charge-chirality, genesis, chiral-closure). Also add a CI action that runs verify_v2_10.py on every pull request. Until a category exists, its link lands on the Discussions home — harmless.