Papers · William Alexander Aldred

The Arrow Census: Every Mechanism That Points Time, Its Price, and the Pairs That Are One Entry in Two Costumes

Published October 29, 2026 · Zenodo · DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23782247

About this paper

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, 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 — one entry in two costumes. The cheapest discriminating observation is a pre-registered search of the CMB data already in hand for 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: derived by no entry unconditionally; derived conditionally at stated prices by six entries, and for measurement by the collapse entry; presupposed by one; declined by the null. The home entry stands at boundary-condition grade, its spin-to-arrow identity KILLED in review, Session 02. The census is COMPLETE as a census. Quantum gravity is NOT SOLVED, the vacuum catastrophe is NOT SOLVED / PARTIAL, and the producing-count stands at 0.

Paper 54 of 95 in the published register. The full text is published on Zenodo under a permanent DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23782247.

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