Hypothesis

One of several rival explanations for a gap, each proposing a fundamentally different mechanism, with the prediction that would tell it apart.

Step 7 writes four to seven hypotheses per gap, maximally divergent: each must use a different domain category, the set must contain a heretic that contradicts the mainstream story, a cross-domain transfer from an unrelated field, and scouts including the possibility that the phenomenon does not exist. A hypothesis carries its mechanism, a discriminating prediction, its lens origin, its domain category and, for a cross-domain one, the source field, the law borrowed and the variable mapping.

On the site a hypothesis is a publishable object of its own, named on arrival, keyed on its run, and read in eight sections: the unknown, the claim, the test, the contest, the import, the bench, the standing and the provenance.