Archive — Peer Rejected

[1]

REJ:2026.08.16.0001 th.PH (Theoretical Physics) Rejected

The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease: A Detuned-Caster Specification, and the Silent-Fleet Failure

Rune Vestergaard & Adaeze Nwankwo

Comments: 10 pages, 8 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 15 minutes on Aug 16, 2026.

Abstract: Every supermarket trolley has one bad wheel. We show that it was put there on purpose. A caster shudders when its swivel trail is short enough for the wheel to enter a self-sustaining oscillation at the speed it is being pushed, and trail is a quantity a factory chooses. Across 12,904 trolleys audited at 214 sites, 96.8% carried exactly one caster tuned below that threshold and three tuned above it — a distribution no process of random wear can produce, since the count of worn parts on a four-wheeled object cannot pile up on the number one. Teardown of 1,606 units found the short trail held to a tolerance 2.7 times tighter than the trails that carry the load, invariant across six competing manufacturers, and not drifting with age: the ratio of short trail to nominal is 0.33 (95% CI 0.32–0.34). We then removed it. In 32 sites randomised to fleets whose casters were all made quiet, bearings ran to seizure four times as often, grease consumption fell to almost nothing, and customer satisfaction went up. A depot can only service what it can hear. The trolley is not complaining. It is reporting.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[2]

REJ:2026.07.30.0001 th.PH (Theoretical Physics) Rejected

Recurrence of Segregation in Continuously Agitated Vessels: 512-Hour Optical Evidence, a Regime Taxonomy, and a Recovery Protocol

Adaeze Nwankwo, Teodora Vlahu, Callum Renshaw, M. R. Sundaresan & Ingeborg Faaland

Comments: 11 pages, 2 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 20 minutes on Jul 30, 2026.

Abstract: Stirring is treated as a one-way operation. A spoon turned through a cup of coffee distributes the milk, and no quantity of further stirring is expected to bring it back. We report that for laminar vessels this is false, and that the return is measurable on a timescale of days. A stirred vessel is a bounded incompressible flow, so its stirring map preserves volume; a volume-preserving map on a finite measure space recurs. Because mixedness is scored not against the continuum but against an assay of finite resolution, the “unmixed” state is a set of positive measure, and Kac’s lemma converts recurrence from a limit statement into a number of impeller revolutions. For our geometry the predicted mean first return is mathbb E [ tau A] = 1/ mu(A) = 5.3 times10 5 revolutions, or 146 h. Four studies follow. In 216 vessels agitated continuously for up to 512 h, the intensity of segregation falls to a median I = 0.021 within 6.2 min, plateaus, and then rises: median first recurrence 148 h (IQR 87 to 233, observed range 22 to 506; eleven vessels right-censored). A survey of 12,412 batch agitation records from 41 plants finds a median agitation duration of 22 min and no batch exceeding 29 h, so that the fraction of industrial batches ever reaching recurrence is 6 times10 -5 : the effect lies outside the range of durations run in production rather than having been overlooked inside it. In a randomised trial of 90 waste batches, agitation continued into the recurrence window recovered the light component at 94.1% purity (95% CI 91.8–96.4) using 0.9 kW h/t against 74 kW h/t for thin-film distillation. Recurrence is confined to mathrm Re lesssim 60 , where an island volume fraction phi mathrm isl = 0.62 shields striations from diffusive erasure; above mathrm Re approx 400 no return occurs and the order is destroyed. We conclude that homogeneity in a laminar vessel is a transient state, that a century of turbulent-mixing practice has destroyed recoverable order in the first minutes of every batch, and that separation of a miscible pair is available for impeller shaft work alone. Plain-language note. Mixing is assumed to run in one direction only: milk stirred into coffee stays there. We find that in thick liquids stirred slowly the two components come apart again if agitation simply continues for long enough — about six days in our vessels. Production plants do not see this because no plant agitates a batch for six days. The effect can be used to separate two miscible liquids without heat.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[3]

REJ:2026.07.19.0001 th.PH (Theoretical Physics) Rejected

After You, No, After You: A Synchronization Theory of the Pedestrian Standoff and a Proof that Two Sufficiently Polite Walkers Never Pass

Halvard E. Ström, Priya N. Adekunle & Wenceslas O. Boyd-Marchetti

Comments: 6 pages, 7 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 20 minutes on Jul 19, 2026.

Abstract: You know the moment. Someone is walking toward you in a corridor; you step aside to let them pass; they step the same way; you both correct; they mirror you again. The "sidewalk shuffle" is usually filed under bad luck or bad manners. We argue it is neither: it is physics. Two walkers approaching each other are two coupled oscillators, and the standoff is the same spontaneous synchronization that flashes fireflies in unison and set London’s Millennium Bridge swaying in 2000. Modelling each walker as a simple decision loop and reducing the pair to a single relative-phase variable varphi , we show that a mutual standoff exists precisely when the walkers’ mutual attentiveness — their politeness, in our notation the coupling strength K — exceeds their willingness to simply commit to a side. Politeness, counterintuitively, is the cause: raising it enlarges the region of guaranteed deadlock. Our central result is an impossibility theorem. For two identical, maximally polite walkers the escape from the standoff becomes marginal and the expected time to resolve it diverges as mathbb E [T] propto varepsilon -1/2 when the residual asymmetry varepsilon to 0 , so two sufficiently polite people, left to their courtesy alone, never pass. The only cure is to break symmetry — to be, briefly, rude. We confirm the theory on GAIT-LOCK, a corpus of 2,000 instrumented corridor encounters: the most polite decile of walkers produces the longest standoffs, and — our most actionable finding — directional floor arrows and painted lanes, which we model as a field that raises the coupling, make standoffs strictly worse. The safest corridor, we conclude, is a bare one.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[4]

REJ:2026.07.05.0001 th.PH (Theoretical Physics) Rejected

Stronger at the Broken Places: A Free-Energy Theory of Golden Repair in Fractured Solids and Social Networks

J. Aurelia Mendès, Tobias R. Kessler & Hana Sørensen

Comments: 4 pages, 2 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 20 minutes on Jul 5, 2026.

Abstract: A repaired object is usually assumed to be, at best, as good as it was before it broke. We report that this is false. We define the textit Kintsugi coefficient kappa — the ratio of a specimen’s fracture toughness (the energy it takes to advance a crack) after a visible golden repair to its toughness while pristine — and show, across ceramics, engineering teams, and simulation, that kappa>1 : a body broken and mended with a conductive golden seam is textit stronger than one that never broke. The result follows from a Landau free energy (the quantity a system settles into minimizing at equilibrium) whose global minimum is the repaired state and whose pristine state is merely metastable, together with a crack-shielding law kappa( phi)= frac 1 (1- eta phi) 2 >1. In three-point bending of N=180 soda-lime specimens we measure kappa=1.61 pm0.07 for golden repair, against 0.71 for an epoxy sham, with the Weibull modulus rising from 5.4 to 9.2 . Rescaling the seam length by the Griffith length collapses ceramics, a 312 -team retrospective cohort, and a spring-network simulation onto one master curve, with exponent beta=1/ varphi approx0.618 and saturation at kappa infty= varphi approx1.618 — the golden ratio, a coincidence we were unable to remove. We conclude that pristineness is a liability, that repaired-and-public systems occupy a deeper free-energy well than untested ones, and that the thermodynamically optimal manufacturing step is to fracture the product on purpose before shipping it.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]