Every technical domain has a completable core — a finite set of infrastructure problems that can be built, tested, finished, and closed. This core is routinely obscured by complexity generated by the domain's own tools and preserved as open by the economic and social structure of the community around it. This paper identifies the epistemological prerequisite for recognizing completable cores, defines a four-step method for closing them, and demonstrates the method across three unrelated domains: software execution infrastructure, operational data infrastructure, and physical parameter derivation. The method is repeatable. The prerequisite is the willingness to distinguish falsifiable claims from unfalsifiable ones, commit to what observations support, and build on those commitments as platforms.
Geoffrey Howland (Fri,) studied this question.