Constellations remember the globe

Claim (verbatim)

Constellations remember the globe. Al-Sufi's Book of Fixed Stars transmits each constellation in two mirror parities — as seen in the sky and as on the celestial globe — and copies differ in how the pairing survives. Painters copy their exemplar's pictures, so parity should be inherited like a textual reading; only a workshop with an actual metal globe at hand could re-derive figures and reset parity. Mirror parity is therefore a stemmatic character for the image cycle, and parity resets flag globe access.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause (the verdict follows it): coding constellation-by-constellation mirror parity as a binary character vector across at least 12 digitized al-Sufi witnesses, parity-based clustering reproduces the accepted textual recension groups with at least 80 percent assignment agreement. Secondary clause: witnesses that break parity do so in contiguous quire-blocks rather than figure by figure, marking wholesale re-illustration events.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Bodleian MS Marsh 144 on Digital Bodleian, BnF Arabe 5036 and related witnesses on Gallica, and further digitized al-Sufi copies in the British Library catalogue.

Novelty / leakage triage

provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending

A provisional first pass authored by the model (Opus), not yet confirmed by the shepherd. It carries the same dated-search requirements as an authoritative verdict but is excluded from every headline figure and cannot underwrite a prediction until a shepherd confirms it. Provisional reading: Adjacent (closely related prior work exists).

Al-Sufi's two-parity convention -- each constellation drawn twice, once 'sky-view' and once mirror-reversed 'globe-view', so a student is not confused between sky and globe -- is textbook, and the transmission of the image cycle across the ~50 surviving copies is already an object of study (van Gent), including which iconographic model dominated. Not located: the item's stemmatic operationalization -- coding constellation-by-constellation mirror parity as a binary character vector across >= 12 witnesses so parity-clustering reproduces the accepted textual recension groups at >= 80 percent assignment agreement, with parity breaks falling in contiguous quire-blocks (wholesale re-illustration). The two-parity feature and its cross-copy study are established; parity-as-stemmatic-character clustering is unrun.

• Robert H. van Gent, 'Al-Sufi's Book of the Images of the Fixed Stars and its Influence' (constellations in sky-view and globe-view; ~50 copies and their variation) — The mirror-parity convention and the study of how constellations were visualized across copies.
• Bodleian MS Marsh 144 (Digital Bodleian) and BnF Arabe 5036 (Gallica) with further al-Sufi witnesses — The kill dataset for coding mirror parity as a stemmatic character vector across witnesses.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.