The Three-Body Problem: satirical research papers

Bunker-Era notes equate strong-interaction material with nuclear-density matter, but a body of that density wide enough for the inspected patch weighs at least 2.4 × 10^8 kg, and ranking seven candidates against the record leaves the surviving classes unseparated.

A search of 2,297 nearby stars finds no warm infrared excess, at most one mining-like abundance pattern in eleven flagged stars and no trail of expansion, capping warm stellar-scale loud civilisations below 0.13%; concealment plus strike survivorship suffices to account for the Great Silence.

A body with the radius and energy of a proton can hold at most 36.2 bits under the Bekenstein bound and each further bit costs 25.9 MeV, so a proton-sized, proton-mass sophon is likely no self-contained supercomputer, though four exits remain open.

Archived question and reply intervals bound the loop delay of the sophon link between Earth and Trisolaris at 132 s, 5.2 × 10^-7 of the light round trip, which leaves the mechanism undetermined and requires no instantaneous entanglement.

Inside a black domain with light speed lowered to 16.7 km/s, a standard time-of-flight mass spectrometer loses an order of magnitude in resolving power at m/z 1,000, small ions suffer most, and free-electron detectors lose their physical basis.

An electrostatic ion trap read by eight independent image-charge pickup tubes cuts the charge uncertainty of single ions above 10 MDa from 0.29 to 0.10 elementary charges, making integer charge assignment reliable and per-ion mass accurate to 0.05%.

An audit of 412 archived drift-tube collision cross sections, spanning the pre-Crisis, Crisis, and Deterrence periods, finds no period effect and no change in dispersion, so sophon interference did not reach low-energy gas-phase ion measurements.

Drift-tube cross sections measured with the tube parallel and perpendicular to a space city's spin axis do not differ, because buffer-gas collisions reduce the Coriolis deflection of a megadalton ion from a feared 2.1 mm to 0.24 µm.

Megadalton protective assemblies from a tardigrade and a resurrection plant unfold in the gas phase through three transitions at the same lab-frame energies per assembly, 8.4, 12.3, and 16.3 keV, while a non-protective control of similar size does not.

A three-party Bell test run during the partial sophon suspension kept its Mermin violation under 60 local filters applied after the record was sealed, bounding any forger's largest within-setting share at 0.61 or more and showing that declaration cannot close the intervention loophole.

The mass lodged in the small universes exceeds the closure shortfall of the main universe by a thin margin, so full return likely closes a "bounce", but a holdback above 0.28 forfeits closure and one above 0.16 delays it past fifty trillion years.

The quarter-pitch rule accepts a nanofilament array whatever its size, but passage of a hull is set by the widest gap, so tolerance to spacing disorder falls from 0.221 at 100 filaments to 0.191 at 1,000.

Abundances of Alpha Centauri A and B give a core mass fraction near 0.29 and exclude the sophon-relayed half-iron core for both stars, but they exclude three Earth masses of refractory solids for A only, narrowly, and cannot test that claim for B.

The archived scatter, interferometer and radiometer records of the close inspection bound the droplet's surface to 0.31 nm RMS roughness over 0.73 to 145 µm periods, 8.2 nm peak-to-valley height, and a surface temperature of at most 205 K.

Exact counts of the hidden plans left open by the Wallfacers' recorded conduct show that Luo Ji's plan space ended about 9.2 million times larger than Tyler's, and that the composition of his record, more than the supply of evidence, likely explains it.

Across 959 redeemed sleeper contracts and 1,439 held by awake holders, hibernators lost the same share of real value as the waking once contract type and recovery phase are fixed, so the Great Ravine did not transfer wealth from sleepers.

Across 57,823 subsidence claims from four insurers in 96 communes over DE 31–54, a drought index predicts next year's claim frequency well in held-out years, but hydrology does not improve the prediction of claim severity.

Exact enumeration shows that the chain-of-suspicion rule shrinks the space of contact histories by more than two orders of magnitude at five civilisations and amplifies the effect of tree shape, while strike-free histories number exactly n!, a share under one in eighty million there.

Across eight asset classes, mean pairwise correlation fell from 0.55 in the Great Ravine window to 0.16 after the Doomsday Battle, and the common factor split in two, so the second shock produced a different correlation structure.

Treating the virtual-reality game Three Body as a stratified text, this paper codes 380 passages from 34 seized session recordings and attributes the historical figures to human hands, dehydration to translated Trisolaran material, and leaves the rest open.

The household objects of the Yun Tianming fairy tales, above all the soap-driven boat of The Glutton's Sea, are load-bearing and not decorative; their domestic register, more than cleverness of plot, is what carried the physics past a supervising censor.

The New Royal Painter was told first and decoded last; this paper argues that the order of telling is evidence of priority, and that the picture which swallows its sitter carried a dimensional warning past the censor because it is the most domestic lesson in geometry.

Fourteen early memoranda on Prince Deep Water, the third Yun Tianming fairy tale, show the first decoding teams disagreeing less about the prince who keeps his size at any distance than about whether, and where, he breaks the household lesson.

Under three strikes a modelled transmitter network spread over six regions delivers the required broadcast energy within 12 h with probability 0.978, against 0.238 for four regions at similar cost, and the best eight-region network of 12 sites reaches 0.999.

A credibility score built from the language of 388 declassified documents predicts held-out panel ratings (r = 0.78) and places the incumbent Swordholder at 0.79, above all five announced candidates (0.48 to 0.66), whose public preference ranking runs broadly against their scores.

Declassified PDC and Fleet assessments from the final years before the battle show that individual forecasters were calibrated on 1,386 resolved sub-forecasts, while consolidation multiplied the odds of a peaceful envoy by 4.3 over the inputs.

Fragment velocities and hull-breach geometry from the Oort debris field place the kill rank to within five places (1σ) for 78.0% of 1,712 parent hulls and put the whole droplet pass at 211 s, with only a nominal formation plan as prior.

In 241 revived Crisis-Era hibernators, erythrocyte Ap4A and total Ap4N rise by about 6% per doubling of suspension time, a small slope beside the elevation already present in short suspensions, and the survivors-only archive cannot locate a limit.

A retrospective on three years of the terrestrial-analogue programme for Trisolaran dehydration biochemistry. The programme has produced two diagnostic frameworks and no measurements. We state what the frameworks can and cannot do, and we answer three current objections.

A companion framework to the dinucleotide-pool model proposes trehalose and related non-reducing disaccharides as the candidate protective solute class for the Trisolaran dehydration cycle, and names tissue carbohydrate composition as the second discriminating measurement.

Three terrestrial reversible-desiccation systems — Artemia cysts, tardigrade anhydrobiosis, and firefly-lantern Ap4A hydrolase — are proposed as candidate comparators for the Trisolaran dehydration cycle. The single discriminating measurement is specific activity of Ap4A hydrolase in Trisolaran tissue, if sample access becomes possible.

A matched-filter search of 9,412 archived pulsar arrival times finds no curvature-drive trail. For 40,000 km chords and lowering of 10^-3 to 10^-2 the bound is 3.3 crossings per 10,000 observations, and two sub-threshold candidates cannot be excluded.