Archive — Peer Rejected

[46]

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]

[47]

REJ:2026.07.04.0001 cs.NO (Computer Science) Rejected

Allen-Wrench-Complete: Flat-Pack Furniture Assembly Instructions Are Turing-Complete

E. R. Flatpöck, Dowel Q. Vantablack & A. L. Hexminster

Comments: 6 pages, 6 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 41 minutes on Jul 4, 2026.

Abstract: Flat-pack furniture ships without words. Because the manufacturer cannot enclose a translation for every buyer, the assembly sheet has to be followed by someone who shares no language, and no prior exposure to the product, with its author — the very same constraint one faces when designing a message for an alien who has never seen Earth. We argue that a notation built to be executed by such a reader is not a picture but a program, and we make the claim precise. We introduce the Flat-Pack Calculus, in which parts are an alphabet, fasteners are operations, the numbered steps are control flow, and the familiar “repeat for the remaining legs” glyph is a loop. We then prove the calculus is Turing-complete — capable, in principle, of any computation an ordinary computer can perform — by showing it faithfully simulates a cyclic tag system, the minimal machine behind the universality of Rule 110. A direct consequence follows: no procedure can decide, from the sheet and the parts alone, whether a given piece of furniture can ever be finished. Assembly is undecidable. We show that the single screw invariably left over at the end is exactly the halting witness this theory predicts, # text leftover fasteners =1 iff text the assembly has halted , report a corpus study of 1 , 024 manuals of which 61 % are Turing-complete (wardrobes disproportionately so; nightstands merely finite-state), and observe that adding a second assembler never lowers the asymptotic step count — it only raises the argument count.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[48]

REJ:2026.07.03.0001 myth.AP (Applied Mythology) Rejected

Return to Delphi: Structured Expert Elicitation as a Lossy Reconstruction of the Original Instrument

Kassandra E. Voulgaris, Milo A. Brandt & P. N. Oikonomides

Comments: 6 pages, 3 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 9 minutes on Jul 3, 2026.

Abstract: The Delphi method is the standard instrument of structured expert elicitation, yet its own literature documents chronic pathologies: overconfident convergence, false precision, and sensitivity to panel composition. We observe that the method’s name is not an homage but an uncited dependency, and we evaluate the hypothesis that RAND’s 1950s protocol is a lossy reconstruction of an earlier forecasting instrument with approximately eight centuries of production uptime. We contribute (i) a theoretical account in which panel consensus performs point-estimate collapse, provably suboptimal under any strictly proper scoring rule, whereas verse-constrained output preserves an ambiguity-calibrated credible set; (ii) a blinded re-scoring of the 214 resolvable responses in the Parke–Wormell corpus ( mathrm BS = 0.212 ; client-error-adjusted Croesus score 0.161 ); and (iii) a 24-month preregistered forecasting tournament ( 131 resolved questions) comparing a methodologically reconstructed Pythia against a 17-expert Delphi panel, a subsidized prediction market, and a sham-gas control. The reconstructed instrument achieved mathrm BS =0.187 versus 0.242 for the panel (paired Delta mathrm BS =-0.055 , p=3 times10 -5 ) with near-nominal calibration ( mathrm ECE =0.031 ), a monotone ethylene dose–response saturating at 3.9 ppm, and a 6.4 times advantage in cost per calibrated forecast. Convergence in the panel arm reduced forecast variance by 74 % while improving accuracy by 6 % , indicating that consensus is social rather than epistemic. We conclude that expert elicitation was not invented in Santa Monica; it was compressed there, with losses.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[49]

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]

[50]

REJ:2026.07.02.0001 neuro.CJ (Neuro-Conjecture) Rejected

The Innate Swipe: Pre-Cultural Bayesian Motor Priors for Multi-Touch Gestures in Screen-Naïve Humans

Wren A. Halloway, Ojo A. Adeyemi, Priya Venkataraman & Tomas Rohrbach

Comments: 7 pages, 7 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 19 minutes on Jul 2, 2026.

Abstract: The multi-touch gesture set—the horizontal swipe, pinch-to-zoom, tap, and edge-drag—is universally treated as a designed convention that users acquire through exposure. We report evidence that it is instead the surface expression of an evolved, pre-cultural motor prior. Using a textit Platonic slab —a responsive capacitive surface that renders no user interface—we elicited gestures in response to non-verbal prompts from four cohorts, including screen-naïve neonates ( n=41 ) and consenting screen-naïve adults ( n=28 ). Screen-naïve adults produced the canonical gesture far above the five-alternative chance rate (scroll-swipe 0.71 , pinch-to-zoom 0.66 , tap-select 0.58 ; all p<10 -6 ) and were well-calibrated in the Tetlock sense (Brier 0.14 ), whereas screen-saturated adults were more accurate but reliably over-confident. Fitting an innateness temperature beta yields hat beta=3.9 (95% CI [3.1,4.8] ) on the responsive slab but only 0.4 on a visually identical inert slab, localizing the effect to the hand’s encounter with a genuine capacitive affordance rather than to hand morphology or culture. We conclude that contemporary touchscreen grammar was not invented but discovered: the hand was waiting for the slab. A single pre-registered null (long-press-to-summon) is reported without adjustment.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[51]

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]