Week 10 Practical: Competing frameworks: cosmic prisoner theory, shadow domain theory, and others

A survey of the theoretical frameworks currently offered to explain the convergence identified in week 9 — read as competing, evidence-bearing claims, not a menu to choose from.

26 April 2027

Before the practical#

Nothing to prepare beyond weeks 7–9’s convergence findings, which every framework this week is trying to explain.

In the practical#

A framework earns space in this phase only if it makes a claim precise enough to generate a possible counterexample. A working survey of frameworks currently in circulation, each held to that standard:

• Cosmic prisoner theory — anomalous sites are containment failures around something already contained elsewhere, leaking rather than originating locally.
• Shadow domain theory — anomalous behaviour is bleed-through from an adjacent, structurally similar domain, rather than a property of the site itself.
• others, briefer, read the same way: what does it predict, and what observed case would break it.

None is presented as this course’s position. Most popular accounts of cosmic prisoner and shadow domain theory don’t actually clear that bar as written — the claim sounds precise until you try to state what would break it.

Afterwards#

No submission this week. Week 11 adds one more framework — the one that currently gets the most attention — and holds it to the same scrutiny.