Every medium has a half-life

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)

Manuscript losses are usually narrated as history — this fire, that war, those dissolutions. The conjecture joins survival to radioactive decay: within a given regime of material and custody (papyrus in dry Egypt, papyrus elsewhere, parchment in institutional libraries, paper in private hands), extant counts by production century fit a simple exponential with a constant regime-specific half-life, catastrophes averaging out as noise around a lawful hazard rate. Books in the same physical and institutional situation faced the same annual odds of destruction, year after year, for centuries. If this holds, two parameters per regime suffice to back-compute total pre-print production from what survives, and every idiosyncratic loss-history explanation becomes a residual around a curve rather than the story itself.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause (carries the verdict): fitting exponential decay to extant counts by production century, institutionally held parchment codices show a half-life in the 350-700 year range and non-Egyptian papyrus a half-life under 200 years, with the exponential model beating linear and power-law alternatives on information criteria in at least 3 of 4 material-custody regimes. Secondary clause: residuals from the fitted curves align with, rather than exceed, documented catastrophe episodes.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Scriptome production-and-survival estimates (in-house) stratified by material, custody type, region, and century; the kill is a statistical model-comparison test.

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 from the model's own knowledge in a zero-tool session and emitted directly as final text.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Constant per-century loss rates and exponential/geometric decay of manuscript stocks are already used in the loss-estimation literature (Buringh's ~-25%/century; unseen-species models), so the mechanism is strongly anticipated, but fitting regime-specific half-lives (parchment 350-700 yr, non-Egyptian papyrus <200 yr) and model-comparing against power-law/linear across four material-custody regimes is an un-run test.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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