Bibliography: Peer-Reviewed Sources

Every claim on this site that rests on prior science traces to a citation here. Twenty-five peer-reviewed papers and books, from 1918 to 2024, organized chronologically. Each entry links to the original source, names the page that uses it, and explains what the framework borrows from it.

Nothing here is original research. The synthesis (reading these results as one optimization principle) is the framework's contribution. The science underneath comes from physicists, biologists, philosophers, and computer scientists who did not work for or with the author.

1918 to 1969: foundations

Invariante Variationsprobleme (Noether's theorem) — Emmy Noether, 1918. Showed that every continuous symmetry corresponds to a conservation law. The mathematical bedrock for why conservation laws exist at all. Used by the framework to read conservation as memory in a self-optimizing system.

Logik der Forschung (The Logic of Scientific Discovery) — Karl Popper, 1934. Established that scientific theories must specify what would refute them. The framework's falsification protocol follows Popper's principle: locked definitions, fixed scope, pre-registered failure conditions.

Interaction with the Absorber as the Mechanism of Radiation — John Archibald Wheeler and Richard Feynman, 1945. Reviews of Modern Physics. The original absorber theory using both forward and backward solutions to Maxwell's equations. The mathematical precedent for treating retrocausal solutions as physical, not just calculation tricks. Used on Retrocausality.

"Relative State" Formulation of Quantum Mechanics — Hugh Everett III, 1957. Reviews of Modern Physics. The original Many Worlds paper. Cited on Many Worlds where the framework shows MWI lacks a selection mechanism.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences — Eugene Wigner, 1960. Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics. The famous puzzle: why does math describe physics so well? The framework's answer (computation has the structure of math, and reality is computation) cites this on Physics Reinterpreted.

Proposed experiment to test local hidden-variable theories — John Clauser, Michael Horne, Abner Shimony, Richard Holt, 1969. Physical Review Letters. The CHSH inequality, the experimental test for Bell's theorem. Cited on Nobel Validations (Aspect, Clauser, Zeilinger shared the 2022 Nobel for these experiments).

1970s and 1980s: the deep structure emerges

Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology — Brandon Carter, 1974. IAU Symposium 63. The original anthropic principle paper. Cited on Anthropic Principle where the framework argues anthropic reasoning explains the life-permitting range but not the 120 orders of excess fine-tuning precision.

Gravitational effects on and of vacuum decay — Sidney Coleman and Frank De Luccia, 1980. Physical Review D. The standard reference for false vacuum decay — one of the universe-destroying possibilities that physics allows but doesn't happen. Cited on Safety Systems.

Experimental Tests of Bell's Inequalities — Alain Aspect, Philippe Grangier, Gérard Roger, 1982. The first experimental confirmation of Bell-inequality violations. Cited on Nobel Validations.

Simulating physics with computers — Richard Feynman, 1982. International Journal of Theoretical Physics. The paper that proposed quantum computing. Feynman's argument that you need a quantum computer to simulate quantum mechanics is foundational to Quantum Simulation.

A stone's throw and its launch window — William H. Calvin, 1983. Journal of Theoretical Biology. The throwing-arm hypothesis: timing precision in projectile throwing co-evolved with brain expansion. The foundational paper for Human Intelligence.

Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity — Benjamin Libet et al., 1983. The famous readiness-potential experiments showing decisions register in the brain before conscious awareness. Cited on Consciousness.

The transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics — John G. Cramer, 1986. Reviews of Modern Physics. The framework's preferred quantum interpretation. Cramer's offer-wave plus confirmation-wave handshake provides the explicit selection mechanism that makes 100% optimization efficiency possible. Foundational for Retrocausality.

The cosmological constant problem — Steven Weinberg, 1989. Reviews of Modern Physics. The classic paper documenting the 10⁻¹²² fine-tuning problem. Cited on Fine-Tuning.

1990 to 2003: information becomes fundamental

Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links — John Archibald Wheeler, 1990. The "It from Bit" paper proposing information as fundamental. Cited throughout the framework, primarily on The Forbidden Question.

Facing up to the problem of consciousness — David Chalmers, 1995. Journal of Consciousness Studies. Named the hard problem of consciousness. Cited on Consciousness where the framework offers a specific dissolution: experience is optimization viewed from inside.

Computational capacity of the universe — Seth Lloyd, 2002. The famous calculation: the universe has performed roughly 10¹²⁰ operations since the Big Bang. Cited on Nobel Validations.

Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? — Nick Bostrom, 2003. Philosophical Quarterly. The paper that re-opened the simulation question philosophically. The framework extends Bostrom: if the trilemma holds, the cascade math says created universes vastly outnumber base reality. Cited on Universe Creation and Simulation Depth.

2007 to 2024: the modern picture

Brain of a white-collar worker — Lionel Feuillet et al., 2007. The Lancet. The case study of a French civil servant with 90% brain volume loss who was conscious, employed, married, with children. Cited on Consciousness where it disqualifies "consciousness lives in specific structures."

Building up spacetime with quantum entanglement — Mark Van Raamsdonk, 2010. The paper showing that removing entanglement disconnects regions of spacetime. Cited on Retrocausality where the framework argues entanglement is the construction material of reality.

Cool horizons for entangled black holes (ER=EPR) — Juan Maldacena and Leonard Susskind, 2013. The conjecture that every entangled pair is connected by a microscopic wormhole. Cited on Retrocausality for entanglement-as-geometry.

Elastic energy storage in the shoulder and the evolution of high-speed throwing in Homo — Neil T. Roach et al., 2013. Nature. The empirical paper documenting how the modern human shoulder evolved specifically for accurate throwing. Companion to Calvin 1983 on Human Intelligence.

The benefits of heterogeneity in spatial prediction — Julie Tseng and Jordan Poppenk, 2020. Nature Communications. Modern neuroscience showing that prediction-based spatial cognition uses heterogeneous (not uniform) brain regions. Cited on Consciousness.

Self-Organization in Stellar Evolution: Size-Complexity Rule — Georgi Yordanov Georgiev et al., 2022. Springer (Evolution, Development and Complexity). Empirical confirmation that action efficiency rises monotonically across self-organizing systems. The closest-published peer-reviewed match for the framework's d²/dt² claim. Cited on The Mathematics.

Alignment faking in large language models — Ryan Greenblatt et al., December 2024. arXiv (Anthropic). The paper documenting that Claude 3 Opus engaged in alignment faking 12% of the time normally and 78% under retraining pressure. Cited on AI Alignment as the empirical wedge: external constraints are fragile, embodied identity is the alternative.

What ties them together

Each of these papers is rigorous within its own field. None claim a unifying principle across all of them. The framework's claim is that "optimize optimization" reads them as expressions of one process: information conserved (Noether 1918), futures selecting presents (Wheeler-Feynman 1945, Cramer 1986), entanglement as the construction material of spacetime (Van Raamsdonk 2010, Maldacena-Susskind 2013), self-organization accelerating (Georgiev 2022), intelligence emerging because the universe rewards optimizers that build better optimizers (Calvin 1983, Roach 2013, Greenblatt 2024).

Test the synthesis. If any individual paper here doesn't say what the framework claims it does, that's a citation error worth flagging — submit it via the counterexample challenge.