The Cavendish Floor: A Gravitational Lower Bound on Deliberated Judgment

It is taken as a figure of speech that a serious person shows gravity and that a hard choice is a weighty one. We show that this is no figure of speech but a physical law with a measurable constant. Treating a deliberating agent as a particle in a decision potential $U(x;g)$ whose wells are the domains of the Cynefin sensemaking framework, we prove that the barrier separating one defensible commitment from another has height $\Delta U=\frac{1}{4}{a}^{2}g$—linear in local gravitational acceleration. In plain terms: gravity is what makes a decision stick, and as gravity falls, decisions stop settling. Below a universal critical acceleration—the Cavendish Floor $g^{\ast }=2.7\pm 0.2\mathrm{m}{\mathrm{s}}^{-2}=(0.28\pm 0.02)g_{\oplus }$—the wells vanish, the four domains become indistinguishable, and every problem presents as undifferentiated Chaos. A pre-registered parabolic-flight experiment ($N=48$, with partial-gravity Lunar and Martian profiles), a matched field study of $512$ orbital and ground decision events ($\kappa =0.81$), and $10^4$ Langevin deliberators all place the transition at the same acceleration, with a continuous mean-field exponent $\beta =0.50\pm 0.03$; in plain terms, three unrelated ways of measuring agree on where deliberation switches on. Because $g^{\ast }$ falls between Lunar ($0.17g_{\oplus }$) and Martian ($0.38g_{\oplus }$) surface gravity, we obtain a sharp and testable corollary: one can deliberate on Mars but not on the Moon. Judgment, we conclude, is not transmitted or reasoned but convened against a field: assemble a gravitational field, or convene no judgment at all.