The Arrow Census: Every Mechanism That Points Time, Its Price, and the Pairs That Are One Entry in Two Costumes
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Eggs break and do not unbreak. Gas spreads and does not gather itself back into the corner. I remember yesterday and I do not remember tomorrow. Every process I can touch tells past from future, and the laws underneath those processes almost do not: run the equations backward and they still run, apart from a small violation in the weak sector that is the wrong size and the wrong kind to set the direction of a breaking egg. So the arrow comes from somewhere else. It comes from a mechanism, or it comes from a boundary, or it does not come from anywhere and we pay for the refusal honestly. This paper is a census of the places the literature says it comes from, built the way the charge census was built: the candidate set closed in advance, a producing test stated for each entry, the price printed beside the claim, and the verdict stated at the size the table earns. Nine entries stand in the set: the null entry, the entropic arrow with its Past Hypothesis, the gravitational arrow of the Weyl-curvature hypothesis, the CPT-symmetric two-boundary cosmology, the time-symmetric boundary pair read at cosmological scale, the quantum arrow of decoherence and measurement, the bounce arrow in its three forms, the dynamical-collapse arrow, and this program's own sealed-pair entry, which enters as a boundary-condition entry and takes its grade in the same table, at the same size, with no discount for being mine. The census's headline is a class statement: of the nine entries in this closed census, four carry a producing test that can in principle separate them from the rest: the Weyl entry in its cyclic form, the CPT-symmetric entry, the bounce entry, and the collapse entry; three are boundary postulates that no observation of the arrow alone can separate from the null entry, and four named pairs are degenerate on every observable we can reach today; the cheapest discriminating observation is a pre-registered search of the CMB data already in hand for the one signature on which the Weyl-cyclic, CPT-symmetric and bounce entries disagree: a primordial gravitational-wave background, present in the first, absent in the second, and shaped in the third. Nothing in this census derives the arrow. The home catastrophe headline is not spent here and is not improved here: quantum gravity is NOT SOLVED, the vacuum catastrophe is NOT SOLVED / PARTIAL, and the producing-count stands at 0. Grades, collected: census COMPLETE as a census (candidate set closed in advance; nine entries) · the arrow: derived by no entry unconditionally; derived conditionally at stated prices by Entries 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9, and for measurement by Entry 8 · presupposed by Entry 6 · declined by Entry 1 · degenerate pairs: four, named in §4 · the home entry: boundary-condition grade, its spin-to-arrow identity KILLED at Session 02, producing-count 0 · quantum gravity NOT SOLVED · the vacuum catastrophe NOT SOLVED / PARTIAL.
Author: Aldred, William Alexander
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7224356204