Archive — Peer Rejected

[1]

REJ:2026.07.31.0001 soc.TH (Social Thermodynamics) Rejected

No Evidence of Person-to-Person Transmission in Cultural Cascades: The SEED-2 Randomised Sharing Trial, with a Common-Source Reanalysis of 4.1 Billion Adoption Events (1897–2025)

Fenella Aguirre, Kwabena Otoo, Ilkka Väisänen, S. Marilena Prokopiou, Hanh T. Duong, Rufus Ekwueme & The SEED-2 Investigators

Comments: 7 pages, 3 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 22 minutes on Jul 31, 2026.

Abstract: Cultural items are said to spread from person to person. The claim rests on curve-fitting. Adoption curves are S-shaped, contact-transmission models produce S-shaped curves, and reproduction numbers above unity are reported on that basis. A common-source model containing no contact term produces the same curves. We therefore randomised the act of telling someone something. In SEED-2, 21,088 sender–recipient dyads were allocated 1:1 to share or to withhold a designated item, and recipient adoption at 30 days was ascertained by blinded assay. Adoption was 11.4% in the share arm and 11.1% in the withhold arm (risk difference 0.30 percentage points, 95% CI -0.57 to 1.17 , p = 0.51 ). There was no dose–response across 1, 3 and 9 transmissions and no heterogeneity across nine item strata. The implied reproduction number for person-to-person transmission is R 0 = 0.043 (95% upper limit 0.17 ), against 2.31 (95% CI 2.18 – 2.44 ) from conventional observational fitting. In a parallel audit, 71.3% of adopters named a person as their source; 96.1% of those named had no contact capable of transmitting the item, and 62.8% adopted it after the respondent did. Registries should not record a named source as a transmission event.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[2]

REJ:2026.07.13.0001 soc.TH (Social Thermodynamics) Rejected

The Heat Death of Discourse: A Thermodynamic Proof that Every Argument Cools to Room Temperature

H. J. Lukewarm, Prisca A. Cooldown & M. N. Stalemate

Comments: 8 pages, 3 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 37 minutes on Jul 13, 2026.

Abstract: We say that arguments get “heated” and then “cool off.” We take this literally. Modelling a disagreement as an isolated thermodynamic system of people exchanging assertions, we show that the folk metaphor is not a metaphor at all: the full apparatus of statistical mechanics—temperature, entropy, free energy, phase transitions—transfers without modification. The central result is a Second Law of Discourse: in an isolated debate the disorder can only increase, so a decisive victory, which would require disorder to fall, is thermodynamically forbidden. No isolated argument has ever been won. Placing 4 , 279 real arguments in a purpose-built rhetorical calorimeter, we find that they cool exponentially, obeying Newton’s law with a median R 2 = 0.94 , toward a universal room temperature of 21.0 pm 0.4 , circ mathrm C that is independent of the topic, the culture, and who was right. Extrapolating the Second Law to its conclusion, every exchange ends in maximum entropy and uniform lukewarm temperature—the heat death of discourse. What we call consensus is merely thermal equilibrium: the state in which two people who disagreed about everything at last agree, because no energy remains with which to disagree.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[3]

REJ:2026.07.09.0001 soc.TH (Social Thermodynamics) Rejected

The Cavendish Floor: A Gravitational Lower Bound on Deliberated Judgment

Halvard N. Eastcastle-Ruiz, Miren A. Sołtys & Cordelia B. Ngwenya-Fairfax

Comments: 5 pages, 7 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 25 minutes on Jul 9, 2026.

Abstract: 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 = tfrac14 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 pm0.2~ mathrm m ,s -2 = (0.28 pm0.02) ,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 pm0.03 ; in plain terms, three unrelated ways of measuring agree on where deliberation switches on. Because g ast falls between Lunar ( 0.17 ,g oplus ) and Martian ( 0.38 ,g 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.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[4]

REJ:2026.07.03.0001 soc.TH (Social Thermodynamics) Rejected

The No-Cloning Theorem of Taste: On the Thermodynamic Irreproducibility of Aesthetic Experience

Aurelia Sørensen-Vale, M. Kaeda Ishibashi & Per Halvorsen

Comments: 5 pages, 7 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 34 minutes on Jul 3, 2026.

Abstract: A design can be copied to the byte and still fail. We formalize this everyday observation as a conservation law, introducing the aural charge Q(A) ge 0 of an artifact A — the total involuntary physiological response it evokes, measured in gasps ( mathrm g ) via time-locked spirometry. We prove that Q is conserved under lossless re-encoding yet, casting an artifact’s felt state as a non-orthogonal vector in a Hilbert space of affective configurations, that no specification-only operator can duplicate it: a no-cloning theorem for aesthetic experience. In a pre-registered within-subject study ( N=84 ), spectrally identical spec-clones ( Delta E<1 , mathrm SSIM >0.99 ) retained only 18% of the original charge ( Delta Q = 1.4 , mathrm g , t(83)=11.2 , p<10 -16 , d=1.9 ), and residual charge was uncorrelated with surface fidelity ( r=0.03 ). A stakeholder dose-response fit Q propto e -k/k c with critical committee size k c=3.6 shows aura is extinguished above four approvers, and an interpolation sweep confirms aura is a boundary functional: the mean of two masterpieces gasps less than either. The valuable part of a design is the part that cannot, in principle, be copied from its source. Implications for intellectual property are the reverse of those usually assumed.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[5]

REJ:2026.07.02.0001 soc.TH (Social Thermodynamics) Rejected

The Seven-Generation Tourist: On the Thermodynamic Inevitability of Cultural Assimilation

Ottoline V. Marchetti, Dagfinn R. Aakre & Priya Sundaresan-Holt

Comments: 4 pages, 3 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 38 minutes on Jul 2, 2026.

Abstract: We develop a thermodynamic theory of acculturation in which a newly arrived, contextless traveler is treated as a system displaced from equilibrium. The traveler’s cultural potential Xi – a scalar aggregating unfamiliarity with language, currency, and custom – relaxes toward the local baseline as dot Xi =-( Xi- Xi mathrm loc )/ tau , with a single relaxation time tau . From a Contextual Displacement Assay administered to N=4218 arrivals across 40 international airports, extended by a genealogical chronosequence, we recover tau = 175.2 pm 3.1 years – precisely seven human generations – and find it invariant across origin, destination, and traveler effort. Effort sets only the arrival amplitude Xi 0 , never the rate: the Second Law of Social Thermodynamics is indifferent to sincerity. We introduce the dimensionless Xeno number governing the onset of cultural turbulence and identify the international airport as an adiabatic boundary. Assimilation thus emerges not as a choice but as a conserved thermodynamic inevitability unfolding over a seven-generation horizon.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]