Falsification Standards

A program that asks its readers to look for structure has a standing obligation: to say, precisely, where its claims can fail. Without that, "look for structure" reads as unfalsifiable — a vocabulary that can absorb any outcome. This document discharges that obligation for Universal Collapse Theory: a single place that gathers where each claim fails, where each layer fails, and how the program as a whole is judged over time.

These conditions are distributed across the corpus — each Technical Note states an acceptance and a rejection criterion, each Methods paper is built around a sharp falsifier, each empirical demonstration carries pre-specified falsifier conditions. This document consolidates that distributed material into one canonical reference, adds the per-layer and per-Prime failure modes, and states the program-level standard in full.

What this paper does not claim. This document does not prove that UCT survives any of these tests. It states the conditions under which it would fail. A program is made falsifiable by naming such conditions in advance and reporting outcomes against them honestly — not by passing them. Where the corpus records a failure against one of these conditions, that failure is part of the standard's function, not a defect in it.

Keywords: falsification; failure modes; acceptance and rejection criteria; program-level evaluation; claim discipline.