Dead tables walk downhill

Status: Anticipated · untested

Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

A copied astronomical table inherits every error of its exemplar; a recomputed table refreshes them. Whether a given copy was recomputed or merely transcribed is usually treated as scribal temperament, but the surprising connection is that it is infrastructure: recomputation requires a live teaching community able to use the canons, so the recomputed fraction of a table family's witnesses should decay measurably with distance from centres of working astronomical instruction. Scribes far from such centres warehoused the numbers; scribes near them used and therefore repaired them. If this holds, error-inheritance becomes a proxy map of where medieval astronomy was actually alive, and the equation of manuscript survival with scientific activity breaks — many surviving copies are dead copies.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Statistical test: among localized witnesses of a single table family in DISHAS, the proportion containing at least one independently recomputed block (errors of the exemplar line corrected against theory rather than propagated) will be at least three times higher for copies from towns with documented university or madrasa astronomical teaching than for copies without, and the proportion will fall monotonically across increasing distance bands from the nearest such centre. Primary clause: the threefold contrast; monotonicity is secondary.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

DISHAS witness-level variant and recomputation data with witness localizations.

Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

This conjecture is bridged, as an L1 lead, onto these Inferpedia subject pages.

Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

Composed blind by claude-fable-5 with zero tool use of any kind; the packet was generated entirely from the model's own knowledge and emitted as a single text message.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Distinguishing recomputed from merely copied table witnesses is an established technique (van Dalen's recomputation-comparison method; Zieme on Gerard's recomputed Almagest tables), but the sociological turn — recomputed-fraction as a distance-decay function from teaching centres, mapping where astronomy was 'alive' — is un-run and unproposed.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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