Books

Prephysics: A Diagnostic Framework for Conditions of Physical Applicability

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

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.

The Blind Spot of Cosmology

German-language monograph. English orientation is provided here; the published title is Der blinde Fleck der Kosmologie.

Ein Standardmodell auf dem Prüfstand.

Im Frühjahr 1998 standen zwei Männer vor zwei Monitoren und sahen eine Zahl, die nicht weggehen wollte.

Die Zahl wurde zur Theorie, die Theorie zum Nobelpreis, der Nobelpreis zum größten Posten eines Modells, das heute Standardmodell der Kosmologie heißt: 95 Prozent seines Inhalts — dunkle Materie, dunkle Energie — sind uns bis heute unbekannt.

Harald Zierhut und Thomas Schwarz fragen: Was, wenn diese beiden Begriffe weniger neue Entdeckungen bezeichnen als Symptome derselben, vor hundert Jahren eingeführten Rechenannahme, die nie mehr zur Debatte stand?

Was sich verändert, ist nicht das, was gemessen wurde — sondern die Frage, wovon es die Messung war.

Ein Buch über den blinden Fleck, der entsteht, wenn ein Modell seine eigenen Voraussetzungen vergisst.

English translation:

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 us 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.