Independent Research Programme in the Foundations of Physics
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Prephysics

A methodological infrastructure for auditing when physical claims remain legitimately applicable beyond their confirmed regimes.

Published April 2026
ISBN 979-8253904121
Research archive 11 papers · Zenodo
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What This Book Argues

A Diagnostic Framework for Conditions of Physical Applicability · Harald Zierhut with Thomas Schwarz · 2026
The book draws on eleven research papers but is not a compilation. It makes visible the architecture of the programme, the cumulative logic connecting its layers, and — in its final chapters — a necessity argument for why such diagnostic infrastructure is not optional once physical claims are extended beyond their confirmed regimes.
This book builds the infrastructure to ask it. Across thirteen chapters and eight architectural layers, it develops Applicability Diagnostics: a formal protocol for auditing whether a physical theory's structural preconditions, level constraints, domain boundaries, and validation requirements are met before a deployment claim is licensed. The protocol delivers determinate, reproducible verdicts — PASS, OPEN, or Limit of Applicability — applicable across cosmology, quantum mechanics, origin strategies, and AI-based physics.
In its closing chapters, the book condenses this architecture into a necessity argument: any field that must license its own deployment claims requires an explicit diagnostic infrastructure. Such an infrastructure is not an add-on to physics. It is one of its structural preconditions.

"A measurement without a stated uncertainty is incomplete, not wrong. A physical claim without disclosed applicability conditions is unaudited, not refuted. This book provides the tools to complete the audit."

Available on Amazon · Print & Ebook · Open-access papers on Zenodo

Why Prephysics
and Why Now?

Physics deploys its theories routinely — across cosmology, quantum mechanics, and AI-driven modelling — into regimes far beyond those in which they were directly confirmed. The standard practice is to assume applicability and treat anomalies as problems of model choice. The prior question — are the licensing conditions for this deployment satisfied? — goes unasked, and therefore unanswered.

The Licensing Gap

Every physical theory carries implicit applicability conditions: structural prerequisites, level constraints, domain boundaries. When a theory is deployed beyond its validated regime, these conditions must be audited — not assumed. Without that audit, anomalies cannot be correctly attributed.

The Missing Infrastructure

Physics has sophisticated tools for internal consistency, predictive accuracy, and empirical fit — but lacks a systematic infrastructure for tracking and disclosing applicability conditions across deployment regimes. Prephysics builds that infrastructure.

Not Anti-Physical

The diagnostic verdict OPEN does not mean "wrong." It means "diagnostically incomplete" — the licensing conditions have not been established in the deployment regime. OPEN is fully compatible with continued use of ΛCDM, quantum mechanics, and AI-based physics.

The Metrology Analogy

A measurement without a stated uncertainty is not wrong — it is incomplete. In the same spirit: a physical claim without disclosed applicability conditions is not refuted — it is unaudited. Prephysics adds that layer of transparency to physical practice.

The demand that applicability conditions be stated, not silently presupposed — this is the core of the prephysical programme. It constitutes a new research mode: neither physics, nor philosophy of science, but a structural precondition for both.

Current Books

Prephysics book cover
Published on Amazon / KDP

Prephysics: A Diagnostic Framework for Conditions of Physical Applicability

Published · April 2026 ISBN 979-8253904121

Physics has transformed our understanding of the world. But whenever a theory is extended beyond the domain in which its formal and empirical success was established, a prior question arises: under what conditions is this extension physically legitimate? Prephysics develops a diagnostic framework for this question. It reconstructs the minimal applicability conditions that physical description must satisfy before claims can count as physically meaningful, and shows how unresolved tensions in cosmology, quantum foundations, and AI-driven physics can be re-described as failures of applicability rather than as mere shortages of mathematical power.

Now available via Amazon / KDP. The open-access papers that underpin the programme remain freely available through the Zenodo Community.

Two Symptoms, One Failure book cover
Second monograph · Published on Amazon / KDP

Two Symptoms, One Failure

Published · 15 April 2026 ISBN 979-8257512681

Dark matter and dark energy are usually presented as two independent discoveries. Two Symptoms, One Failure argues instead that they may be coupled symptoms of one modelling overextension: the application of the standard cosmological framework beyond the range in which its assumptions are actually justified. The book treats galaxy rotation curves, lensing, cosmic expansion, structure formation, and the Bullet Cluster with full seriousness, while asking whether the standard inference from discrepancy to hidden content may itself be methodologically premature.

Now available via Amazon / KDP in English. Format currently listed on Amazon: 301 pages, ISBN 979-8257512681.

Der blinde Fleck der Kosmologie book cover
Third monograph

Der blinde Fleck der Kosmologie

Coming soon German-language volume announced

A standard model under scrutiny.

In the spring of 1998, two men stood before two monitors and saw a number that refused to go away.

The number became a theory, the theory became a Nobel Prize, and the Nobel Prize became the largest component of a model now known as the standard model of cosmology: 95 percent of its content — dark matter and dark energy — remains unknown to this day.

Harald Zierhut and Thomas Schwarz ask: what if these two terms name not so much new discoveries as symptoms of the same calculational assumption introduced a hundred years ago and never seriously reopened for debate?

What changes is not what was measured, but the question of what the measurement was a measurement of.

A book about the blind spot that emerges when a model forgets its own preconditions.

Selected Publications

Eleven peer-archived papers across nine architectural layers — from structural preconditions to the capstone prephysical turn. Each entry is independently citable and anchored by a persistent DOI.

1
Structural Preconditions: Seven Conditions of Possibility for Physical Description
Zierhut, H. & Schwarz, T. · 2026a · Layer I
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19186647
Layer I
2
Levels of Description: A Diagnostic Framework for Conditions of Physical Applicability
Zierhut, H. & Schwarz, T. · 2026b · Layer II
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18214023
Layer II
3
When Physical Applicability Fails: A Diagnostic Protocol for Probabilistic Claims
Zierhut, H. & Schwarz, T. · 2026c · Layer III
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19134159
Layer III
4
When AI "Discovers" Physics: A Verdict Protocol for Machine-Learning Claims
Zierhut, H. & Schwarz, T. · 2026d · Layer III
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19035510
Layer III
5
When Interpretations Fail the Test: Applicability Diagnostics for Quantum Mechanics
Zierhut, H. & Schwarz, T. · 2026e · Layer IV
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19145302
Layer IV
6
When Physics Demands Its Own Beginning: The Initial-Conditions Regress in Cosmology
Zierhut, H. & Schwarz, T. · 2026f · Layer V
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18968140
Layer V
7
What Origin Strategies Cannot Avoid
Zierhut, H. · 2026g · Layer VI
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19035925
Layer VI
8
When the Framework Audits Itself: Self-Applicability and the Structural Boundary of Physical Explanation
Zierhut, H. · 2026h · Layer VII
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19146171
Layer VII
9
Why Applicability Conditions Are Necessary: A Fourteen-Case Argument
Zierhut, H. · 2026i · Layer VIII
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19162507
Layer VIII
10
The Regime Profile of General Relativity: A Validation-Licensing Audit of ΛCDM
Zierhut, H. · 2026j · Layer V
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18956631
Layer V
11
The Prephysical Turn
Zierhut, H. · 2026k · Layer IX · Capstone
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19038967
Layer IX
→ View the complete Zenodo Community: applicability-diagnostics

The Authors

Harald Zierhut
Author · Principal Investigator

Harald Zierhut leads the Prephysics programme. His work focuses on the limits of physical explanation, cosmological boundary questions, and the diagnostic conditions under which physical claims remain legitimately applicable.

Thomas Schwarz
Co-Author · Analytical Collaborator

Thomas Schwarz contributes as co-author and analytical collaborator. His background in technology, systems thinking, and structural analysis strengthens the programme’s emphasis on explicit criteria, transparency, and disciplined applicability audits.

Prephysics as a Research Field

The question "when is a physical theory applicable here?" is not a question that physics itself answers. It is a prior question — a prephysical question. Answering it requires a disciplinary mode that is distinct from physics proper, from the philosophy of science as traditionally practiced, and from the sociology or history of science.

"Prephysics is not a critique of physics. It is the systematic investigation of the conditions that must be satisfied before a physical description can legitimately be applied — the infrastructure that physics presupposes but does not supply."

The Applicability Diagnostics programme is a sustained attempt to operationalise this insight: to transform it from a philosophical observation into a diagnostic tool with determinate outputs — verdicts (PASS / OPEN / FAIL) that are reproducible, auditable, and updateable as new evidence arrives.

The programme builds on work by Nancy Cartwright, Margaret Morrison, Michael Weisberg, Roman Frigg, Michela Massimi, and the contributors to the Philosophy of Astrophysics volume (Boyd et al., 2023) — scholars who have shown that the relationship between theory and application in physics is neither transparent nor self-licensing. The contribution of Applicability Diagnostics is to operationalise this insight into a working diagnostic instrument.

The book and its underlying papers are addressed primarily to philosophers of physics and philosophers of science, secondarily to cosmologists and theoretical physicists with methodological interests, and in its AI chapter to researchers concerned with the epistemic status of machine-learning-generated physical claims.

Legal Notice

Media owner and responsible for content
Harald Zierhut
Independent Researcher
Tannenstraße 6
A-4484 Kronstorf
Austria
E-mail: [email protected]

Purpose of the website
Non-commercial academic information on the Prephysics research programme, including the monograph, open-access papers, author information, and links to external research repositories.

Editorial line
Information on the independent Prephysics research programme and its publications in philosophy of physics and foundations of science.

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Contact & Research Information

Contact

[email protected]

For academic correspondence, replication enquiries, and media requests regarding the Applicability Diagnostics research programme and the monograph.

Research Archive

Zenodo Community: applicability-diagnostics

Open-access papers are available individually and remain fully citable.

Research Status

Author: Harald Zierhut
Co-Author: Thomas Schwarz
Status: Independent research programme in philosophy of physics and foundations of science

Legal Notice / Imprint

Media owner / responsible for content: Harald Zierhut
Tannenstraße 6
A-4484 Kronstorf
Austria
[email protected]

Purpose: Non-commercial academic information on the research programme and its publications.
Editorial line: Information on Prephysics, philosophy of physics, and foundations of science.