The Institutional Imperative: Why Cosmology Cannot Fail A Structural Analysis of Protected Paradigms in Modern Physics

This paper examines the institutional, economic, and political structures that render contemporary cosmological and particle physics paradigms effectively unfalsifiable through non-epistemic means. Derived entirely from reanalysis of existing public datasets with zero institutional funding or resources, the author's Webb Mechanical Metric (WMM) framework demonstrates empirically superior performance across multiple domains—yet faces systematic exclusion. While "Consensus as Constraint" established the logical impossibility of falsifying theories protected by coordinated consensus, this work documents the material infrastructure that enforces such consensus. Through quantitative analysis of funding flows, career incentives, publication gatekeeping, and institutional dependencies, we demonstrate that the Standard Model and ΛCDM cosmology are protected not by empirical validation but by economic necessity. The framework presented explains why superior predictive models (including the author's empirically-validated alternatives) face systematic exclusion regardless of performance metrics. We conclude that modern physics has evolved institutional structures optimized for paradigm preservation rather than paradigm testing, creating conditions where theoretical failure has become economically and professionally impossible. Regardless of truth, the current system is too big to fail.