Mathine — Evidence In, Trust Out

From Fields to Strings: A Field-Stack and Circle-of-Equivalence Program for String Theory

Mathine: Circle-of-Equivalence Proofpack Machine
Link: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18882441

String theory is often defended through internal consistency, mathematical elegance, and a network of dualities that suggest multiple descriptions encode the same physics. But those same strengths create an audit problem: redescription is abundant, regimes are subtle, and “equivalence” can drift into rhetoric when invariants, scope, and replay conditions are not pinned down.

This paper proposes a Field-Stack and Circle-of-Equivalence (CoE) program that reframes duality claims as governance objects. The central move is to treat “same physics” as an operational contract rather than an interpretive stance, and to require route-independent closure under declared transforms as the default promotion criterion.

The program packages each duality claim with explicit admissible transforms, replayable invariants, falsifiers, regime stamps, and a verification budget. Instead of letting equivalence be argued by elegance or authority, it becomes a set of executable commitments: what redescription is allowed, what must stay invariant, what would break the claim, and what it costs to check.

To make this portable, the paper introduces Transport-Ready Proofpacks for duality claims—receipt-complete bundles designed to travel across teams, tools, and time without silently changing the claim. This is meant to prevent “equivalence drift,” where the statement being defended gradually shifts as it moves between formulations, audiences, or technical subcommunities.

A second key move is to treat typed non-closure (HOLD/INFEASIBLE) as a first-class scientific output. Instead of burying failed bridges or missing dictionaries, the methodology makes non-closure publishable and reusable—so the community accumulates audited obstacles and repair templates rather than losing them to narrative smoothing.

The paper is intentionally scoped: it does not claim to prove string theory or to deliver novel empirical predictions in isolation. It proposes a discipline for making the strongest parts of the string program promotable under adversarial redescription—reducing interpretive degrees of freedom by turning “equivalence talk” into replayable disputes over receipts, invariants, and scope rather than authority or coherence.