Δt Framework — Papers and Working Notes

New here? See unpingable.github.io for the project root — author (James Beck), scope, and the full preprint list. The companion Lean repo is the formal audit harness. See the methodology page for what the BROKEN / STALE / SOUND register is doing and why.

This repository contains the prose side of the Δt framework: a research series on systemic failure, temporal mismatch, authority collapse, and recovery under degraded conditions.

The papers develop the theory. The companion Lean repo audits selected claims by translating them into explicit definitions and theorem statements, then checking whether they actually follow. Some survive. Some need narrower conditions. Some break.

The breakage is part of the record, not a defect — every formalized claim carries a status of BROKEN, STALE, SOUND, or OPEN in the Lean repo's CLAIM-REGISTER.md. That register is one of the more honest interfaces in the project: it makes legible which slogans were structural claims and which were only useful as discovery handles.

This is not a claim that Lean proves the whole theory true. The formalization is a forcing function against theory-by-metaphor; it does not replace case studies, simulations, or operational evidence.

Companion repos

• This repo (papers): prose papers, working notes, primitives, exploratory writing, specifications, and the research-program structure
• Lean repo: unpingable/lean — formal claim register, proof attempts, corrected theorem statements, and the BROKEN / STALE / SOUND audit

The paper-indexed crosswalk between the two — which papers have formalization warrants, what kind (certify / sharpen / expose looseness / bridge), and whether the mapping is paper-ready — lives in docs/formalization-index.md. The module-indexed inverse lives in the Lean repo at PAPER-MAP.md.

Structure

• preprint/ — numbered research papers published on Zenodo as part of the delta-t-framework series
• working/ — upstream framing, theoretical substrate, and exploratory writing not yet published
• working/primitives/ — named failure shapes and meta-doctrine (e.g. stale-binding, role-accretion, inhibitory-governance-collapse)
• specifications/ — formal architecture and design specifications
• templates/ — reusable templates for metadata and READMEs
• tools/ — operational scripts (currently: zenodo_validate.py, a pre-push drift checker)
• docs/ — paper-side crosswalk to the Lean formalization

Reading Guidance

If you're new:

• Start with the preprints — PDFs and DOCX files are the canonical published artifacts
• Use the Markdown files for source context or LLM ingestion
• See preprint/README.md for a conceptual map of the research program
• For the audit story (which claims survived formalization, which broke, and what the broken ones taught), see docs/formalization-index.md and the companion Lean repo

Formalization

See the dedicated section above and docs/formalization-index.md. Cashout classes are certify, sharpen, expose looseness, and bridge artifact — the index records which class each formalization falls into and whether the prose-to-formal mapping is currently paper-ready.

License & Attribution

• Materials published on Zenodo are licensed CC BY 4.0, as indicated there.
• Other contents of this repository may have different licenses; see file headers where applicable.
• Unless otherwise stated, text in this repository is CC BY 4.0.