The Symmetrical Epistemic Audit
No theory gets privileged vocabulary. No failed toy model gets promoted into a universal impossibility proof.
- Qualitative phenomenon
Can an explicitly stated classical model produce the effect?
- Quantitative law
Does it recover measured scaling, thresholds, spectra and parameter dependence?
- Full statistics
Does it recover fluctuations, correlations, event timing and higher moments—not merely the mean?
- Common dynamics
Does the same ontology survive multiple experiments without phenomenon-specific patches?
- Novel discrimination
Can it predict an outcome not used to construct it, preferably one on which standard QM and the reconstruction differ?
Forbidden shortcuts
“Drude fails, therefore classical physics fails.” “Bell rejects local hidden variables, therefore Copenhagen is proved.” “The Casimir force matches a vacuum-energy calculation, therefore vacuum energy was measured.” “A formula contains ℏ, therefore its ontology is quantum.” None is logically licensed without the missing steps.
What classical means here
Objective beables or fields, explicit dynamics, continuous state evolution where possible, stochasticity represented as physical or epistemic variables rather than irreducible measurement magic, and detector interactions included in the model. Locality is a preferred constraint, not a definition we will secretly relax; if a reconstruction needs nonlocal or global boundary structure, it must say so openly.