Status: selected search territory for the first discovery cycle; no investigation has been selected.
Stress accumulation, memory, recovery, hysteresis, resilience, relaxation, and phase transitions across physical and environmental systems.
The territory may expose translation gaps among urban heat, ecological recovery, batteries, materials, grids, and climate systems while retaining measurable states, time series, public data, and computational tests.
- The phenomenon has a measurable state and temporal behavior.
- At least one credible public dataset or reproducible simulation is plausibly available.
- Competing explanations can be stated.
- A computational result can be falsified or externally checked.
- Cross-disciplinary terminology or data use creates a plausible discovery opportunity.
- Questions requiring clinical intervention, human-subject experimentation, or restricted personal data.
- Claims requiring a wet laboratory as the only meaningful verifier in the first cycle.
- Purely descriptive mapping without a hypothesis or falsification path.
- Famous open problems selected mainly for prestige.
- Topics whose minimum credible computation exceeds the first-cycle resource budget.
- A narrower Earth-systems-only territory centered on heat recovery.
- A materials-only territory centered on passive thermal management.
- A domain-neutral search for underused public datasets.
Scores use 0–4 and are planning judgments to be challenged by corpus evidence.
| Territory | Coherence | Translation-gap potential | Public-data plausibility | Computational tractability | Risk of premature lock-in | Decision |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stress, memory, and recovery across physical/environmental systems | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 2 | Selected |
| Earth systems and heat recovery only | 4 | 2 | 4 | 4 | 4 | Retain as likely investigation family, not the search boundary |
| Passive thermal materials only | 4 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 4 | Retain as alternative investigation family |
| Domain-neutral underused datasets | 1 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 1 | Reject for cycle one as too unconstrained |
The selected territory wins because it preserves a real cross-disciplinary translation test without attempting all of science. The decision is reversible if the bounded corpus shows inadequate comparable evidence or computation.
- Publication window: begin with reviews and dataset documentation from the most recent ten complete years, then include older seminal work only when cited as foundational or necessary to resolve a claim.
- Initial domains: no more than four. At least one must be environmental or Earth-system and at least one non-Earth physical system.
- Initial corpus: 40–80 high-value sources, with a maximum of 25 per domain before the coverage review.
- Source mix: reviews, primary studies, dataset or benchmark documentation, and negative/corrective evidence where available.
- Candidate generation: do not promote candidates until at least two gap types have been exercised across the corpus.
- Compute: favor analyses runnable on the available local machine or modest hosted resources; exclude first-cycle questions requiring bespoke large-scale training.
- Data: public, legally accessible, and reproducibly obtainable without bypassing controls.
- Time: the first scope/corpus cycle should produce a coverage review before any expansion.
Stop expanding the territory and proceed to candidate generation when:
- each included domain has met its source-mix target;
- two consecutive bounded retrieval passes add no new high-level mechanism, contradiction class, or dataset family;
- terminology and claim spot checks meet the provenance contract; and
- remaining gaps are recorded rather than hidden.
Reopen the scope decision if:
- fewer than two domains have adequate public evidence;
- apparent translation gaps reduce to superficial vocabulary overlap;
- credible computational tests are unavailable within the budget; or
- safety, licensing, access, or expertise constraints make the comparison unreliable.
This selection chooses where to search, not what result to seek. Phoenix thermal memory, passive thermal materials, batteries, ecological recovery, grids, or another question must all earn advancement through the same dossier and novelty-challenge process.