Temporal Closure

Book VI reframes gravity’s existence itself as a question about a system’s running history, not its instantaneous state. The closure functional is a threshold on the time-averaged magnitude of angular momentum:

Gravity is “on” (a persistent, bound orbit) when the history-averaged ⟨|L|⟩ stays above the critical value Lcrit, and “off” (closure lost) when it decays below — meaning two systems with the identical instantaneous statecan have different fates depending on their accumulated history, not the instant alone. This is demonstrated directly in the lab’s closure-story animation: the same initial condition, run at two different damping values, ends in opposite outcomes.

The same reasoning, applied to how many distinct stable damping regimes exist at all, gives the corpus’s own headline correction: an original claim of at most 7 stable universes was found, on re-derivation from the underlying data, to actually bound the count at 22 — see Theorem N.1.