Appendix B: Provenance Index

Appendix B — Provenance Index

Draft v1. Per series convention. This index gathers the book's provenance system in one place: the tag definitions, a chapter-by-chapter register of what was claimed under each tag, the register of invented scenes, and — because Chapter 10 promised it — the full verification ledger of the swampland literature map on which that chapter's physics stands. In production, each register entry expands into full citations; this draft fixes the architecture and the commitments.

The tags

• [VERIFIED] — established physics or mathematics, or an independently confirmed empirical result, that holds regardless of string/M-theory's fate. (Examples: black-hole entropy scaling with area as theoretical result within semiclassical gravity; the 2015 gravitational-wave detection; the proven mirror theorems; lunar reflectance and tidal locking.)
• [SOURCED] — consensus results, standard history, or established research literatures, cited in good faith to their standard sources. This is the workhorse tag, covering both the physics history (the duality revolution, the naming of M-theory) and the human sciences (attachment research, the anthropology of mourning, the choice-overload literature).
• [BOUNDARY] — the edge of anyone's knowledge: open problems, live controversies, and the places where this book's own analogies reach their tested limit. The final [BOUNDARY] in the book is set on its own thesis.
• [ILLUSTRATIVE] — an image doing image-work: organizing a question without asserting an isomorphism. The moon-mappings carry this tag throughout.
• Structural analogy* — the book's central device, flagged per chapter: a claim that two systems share a shape at pattern level, offered because the shape is exactly statable in one domain and instructive in the other; never a claim that the physics evidences the human conclusion.
• [FOUNDATIONAL] — used in the Chapter 10 register, following the source map's convention: pre-arXiv or field-defining works cited by journal reference.

The standing rules

1. Every chapter drafts its human argument first; the physics is fitted to it, never the reverse. The human argument must survive removal of the physics (the "removal test" of Appendix A). 2. No one-to-one mappings between the five models of the self and the five named string theories. The analogy lives at pattern level only. This refusal is stated in Chapters 1, 2, and here. 3. Each of the five partial models returns once in Parts II–IV as a limit of the relational picture, never as a casualty (the Chapter 2 courtesy). Register: biological → Ch. 3; computational → Ch. 4; narrative → Ch. 5; social → Ch. 7; contemplative → Ch. 8. 4. The M-motifs (membrane, matrix, mirror/mystery, mother) are offered one per part and released; none is chosen (Ch. 11). 5. Invented scenes are disclosed in their chapters' provenance notes and registered below.

Chapter register

Introduction / Chapter 1. [VERIFIED]: lunar reflectance (~12%), light travel times, earthshine and its Codex Leicester explanation, the far side's illumination, libration (~59%), tidal locking, tidal force's independence from illumination. [SOURCED]: source amnesia; the cultural shaping of emotional repertoires; deprivation cases (previewed, weight deferred to Ch. 7); handwriting provenance. [ILLUSTRATIVE]: all moon-to-self mappings (far side as privacy, libration as intimacy, earthshine as mutuality, locked face as relational posture). Structural export: borrowed radiance vs. own gravity.

Chapter 2. [SOURCED]: the five-superstring situation and 1995 duality revolution; the five self-traditions (Damasio/interoception; Ricoeur, McAdams, Dennett; Cooley, Mead, Vygotsky; Friston, Hohwy, Metzinger; Buddhist psychology and Zahavi). [VERIFIED]: absence of experimental confirmation of string theory. [ILLUSTRATIVE]: the elephant. Standing commitments recorded: the steelman rule; the social self not to be crowned; the mapping refusal.

Chapter 3. [SOURCED]: compactification, momentum/winding modes, R ↔ 1/R T-duality, self-dual radius (mathematics within an untested framework — the standing caveat, hereafter "the caveat"); the historical thinning of mourning practice; friendship-formation hours; norm transmission. [ILLUSTRATIVE]: the minimum-radius flip; the self as self-dual radius. Structural analogy: intimate/vast as motion/winding; scale chauvinism. Invented: the kitchen-table couple, the widow, the friendless man (composites).

Chapter 4. [VERIFIED]: QED's perturbative precision. [SOURCED]: coupling constants, perturbation-theory failure at strong coupling, Montonen–Olive, S-duality, elementary/solitonic exchange, the eleventh dimension from strong-coupled IIA (the caveat); gridlocked-conflict research; positions vs. interests; moral foundations; adolescent autonomy findings; persuasion profiling. [ILLUSTRATIVE]: the eleventh dimension as crisis-revealed character. [BOUNDARY]: the three verdicts' real cases. Invented: the mug scene, the estranged father/daughter, the parent and fifteen-year-old (composites). The symmetry test (ethics of legibility) is the book's own.

Chapter 5. [VERIFIED]: the mirror theorems (proven mathematics — the chapter's marked upgrade); the 1991 curve-counting episode's vindication. [SOURCED]: Calabi–Yau compactification and geometry-determines-physics (the caveat); New Orleans and Japanese funerary practice; the shaping of felt grief by form; human universals (controversies to be carried, not smoothed); continuing bonds; restorative justice, contemplative borrowing, twelve-step liturgy; initiation universals and the unhoused-invariant cases. [BOUNDARY]: the central disanalogy — exact physics equivalence vs. lossy human translation. Framing claims (cultures as computational resources; the physics-unhoused) are the book's own.

Chapter 6. [SOURCED]: Bekenstein–Hawking area scaling; holographic principle; AdS/CFT and its citation history; bulk-depth/boundary-scale; non-local redundant encoding; Ryu–Takayanagi (the caveat, plus chapter-specific flags). [BOUNDARY]: AdS/CFT's conjectural status; AdS ≠ our universe; cosmological holography open; the far-side reservation (persons may contain bulk written nowhere) — maintained against the book's own metaphor. [SOURCED] (human legs): other-ratings and thin-slice research; internalization; solitary confinement; re-minding in dementia care. [ILLUSTRATIVE]: shared-world-as-bulk. Invented: the wake. Chapter's ruling: AdS/CFT as proof of coherence, never proof of thesis.

Chapter 7. [SOURCED]: open/closed strings, Dirichlet conditions, Polchinski's D-branes, endpoint freedom, identity-at-the-ends, mass-with-separation, brane worlds, the graviton's independence (the caveat); Strange Situation and secure-base findings; adult attachment and avoidance-as-vigilance; second-person neuroscience and hyperscanning (flagged young and contested); participatory sense-making; Thoreau's Concord attachments; monastic institutional density; cowboy labor history; retirement and life-transition findings. [ILLUSTRATIVE]: mass-as-burden; drift-as-heaviness. [BOUNDARY]: the severed-end notation. The social self's amendment (boundary conditions vs. music) is the book's own.

Chapter 8. [VERIFIED]: the ~10³⁶ gravity/EM ratio; no gravitational screening; the 2015 LIGO detection and its isolation engineering. [SOURCED]: the graviton as closed-string excitation; bulk propagation and the dilution account (the caveat); estranged-grief literature; the Mandela history; delayed-influence phenomena; children's discrimination of attention from its performance; Weil. [ILLUSTRATIVE]: the recital scene. Structural analogy: mattering as gravitational care; the loud/quiet force inventory; stillness as receiver maintenance. Invented: the estranged son. The contemplative amendment (the loop as graviton) is the book's own, with the emptiness-compassion boundary credited to the tradition itself.

Chapter 9. [SOURCED]: flux-compactification counting (10⁵⁰⁰), the landscape coinage, the moduli problem (drifting constants, fifth forces), KKLT stabilization, metastability and bubble nucleation (the caveat); commitment and marital-maintenance literatures; constitutional stability; regret and counterfactual research; option-devaluation, choice-overload, maximizer–satisficer findings; founding-team crisis-fixing. [BOUNDARY]: the landscape controversy, unadjudicated. Invented: the couple at the altar, the founders (composites). The two-sided foreclosure ledger and the vow-as-conditional-stripping analysis are the book's own.

Chapter 10. See the map ledger below, which governs this chapter's physics citations. [SOURCED]: Fourier's system and the phalanx record; New Harmony; migration/recovery/identity-change literatures; post-affair outcomes. [BOUNDARY]: the entire de Sitter question — load-bearing: the chapter's argument requires only the coherent/constructible distinction, which the phalansteries establish independently. [FOUNDATIONAL]: Dine–Seiberg. The four human conjectures and the "swampland sentences" coinage are the book's own. The cartographer's confession is documented history, auditable in the map's own revision note.

Chapter 11. [SOURCED]: the naming history, Witten's candidates and standing refusal, the W-inversion, matrix theory, the theory's incomplete formulation. The M·A·H·A paragraph asserts nothing. Final tag: the thesis — [BOUNDARY].

Register of invented scenes

The kitchen-table couple, the widow of Chapter 3, the friendless man, the chipped-mug couple, the estranged father and daughter, the parent and fifteen-year-old, the wake, the estranged son and his father, the recital parent, the couple at the altar, the two founders. All are composites constructed to illustrate findings that are independently [SOURCED] in their chapters; no invented scene carries an evidential claim not separately grounded. The two funerals of Chapter 5 are not invented; they are drawn from documented practice, with the reminder that both traditions are internally various.

The swampland map ledger

Chapter 10's physics stands on The de Sitter Problem in the String Swampland: A Verified Literature Map (M. M. Rajan, architect and curator; revision 1, June 2026) — a non-peer-reviewed, provenance-verified synthesis of a contested literature, reliable as a map of who argues what and where the fault lines run, and not a substitute for the primary papers. Its production method (human-directed AI synthesis with independent citation verification) and its disclosed failure-and-correction — a draft labeling its citation list "key verified papers" while verification was pending, caught because the workflow required verification to be executed before publication — are described in Chapter 10, where the episode serves as the book's own discipline demonstrated on itself.

Verified identifiers (resolved against arXiv/INSPIRE-HEP; authorship and camp placement confirmed): 1412.5702 (Michel et al.); 1901.02022 (Kallosh–Linde–McDonough–Scalisi); 1908.04788 (Kachru–Kim–McAllister–Zimet); 1206.6369 (Bena et al.); 1707.08678 (Moritz–Retolaza–Westphal); 1804.01120 (Danielsson–Van Riet); 1707.01095 (Gallego–Marsh–Vercnocke–Wrase); 2201.03572 (Junghans); 2202.04087 (Gao–Hebecker–Schreyer–Venken); 1806.08362 (Obied–Ooguri–Spodyneiko–Vafa); 1810.05506 (Ooguri–Palti–Shiu–Vafa); 1807.05193 (Garg–Krishnan); 1808.09440 (Akrami–Kallosh–Linde–Vardanyan); 2205.12293 (Montero–Vafa–Valenzuela); 2208.01057 (Blumenhagen–Brinkmann–Makridou); 1906.05225 (Lüst–Palti–Vafa); 1806.09718 (Agrawal–Obied–Steinhardt–Vafa); 1808.02877 (Heisenberg–Bartelmann–Brandenberger–Refregier); 1909.11063 (Bedroya–Vafa).

Foundational, cited by journal reference: hep-th/0301240 (KKLT); hep-th/0502058 (LVS); Phys. Lett. B 162 (1985) 299 (Dine–Seiberg).

Sourced but not independently re-resolved in the map's final pass (to be resolved before this book's production): 1203.1750; 2307.11048; 2002.11761; hep-ph/0611184; 2307.15060 — none conjecture-defining; residual risk low but nonzero, and carried here rather than hidden.

Corrections disclosed by the map (attributions corrected during synthesis, then confirmed): 2208.01057 reassigned from Obied–Ooguri–Vafa to Blumenhagen–Brinkmann–Makridou; 2307.11048 reassigned to Law-Smith–Obied–Prabhu–Vafa.

Open items inherited by this book's production checklist: resolve the five [SOURCED] identifiers; confirm the first-name rendering of G. Venken (2202.04087); spot-check drifting affiliations (Marsh, Shiu); final human read of the map against this book's uses of it.

Production checklist (carried from the drafts)

1. Full citations for every [SOURCED] entry in the chapter register, to the standard the map sets: identifiers resolved before any "verified" label is applied — never after. 2. The five map identifiers above. 3. Physics review of Chapters 3–10 by a string theorist, with standing instructions to be hostile to every analogy — the steelman rule, run against the book itself. 4. Human-sciences review of the attachment, hyperscanning, universals, and choice literatures, flagged where young or contested in the text and to be re-flagged if the ground has moved. 5. Confirmation that every invented scene remains marked as such in final copy. 6. The final tag on the final page checked one last time: the thesis, [BOUNDARY], with its author's entire assent.

This index is itself subject to the book's rules: it claims verification only where verification was performed, discloses what remains open, and inherits its method — checkmark after the checking, never before — from the map whose failure taught the lesson. The borrowed light of this book runs all the way down: even its provenance system is on loan, from a document that had to catch itself lying about verification before it could be trusted to verify anything. It caught itself. That, more than any single citation, is the credential.