The Fence Arithmetic: A Method Paper

My census evaluates the load-bearing steps of physical theory, and across its papers one move recurs so regularly that it deserves a name, a statement, and rules a referee could apply without me in the room. The move is this: take a premise at its own address, find the boundary the premise's own machinery draws around the premise's domain, and print the ratio between where the premise is used and where its own machinery says it stops. I call it the fence arithmetic. This paper abstracts the method from three exhibits already in the corpus and states its rules. Exhibit A is my Saha evaluation (CC-123, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23998501): the dilute premise's own screening machinery draws two fences, the Debye-length fence and the coupling fence, and they stand a fixed (4π)³ = 1984.401708 apart — 1.080025×10¹⁷ cm⁻³ against 2.143203×10²⁰ cm⁻³ at 10,000 K on my bench, both scaling as T³, a separation of 3.297630 dex that is a property of the premise, not of any star. Exhibit B is my Alfvén evaluation (CC-130, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23998548): the frozen-in number falls linearly with length and reaches order unity only at L* = 1.152798e-06 m on the declared corona inputs — the fence is a length, and the ratio between the system scale and the fence is the value. Exhibit C is the Aldred Limit's own domain fence: the spin-fluid model's spacing at its bounce density is 2.666420e-13 of the neutron Compton wavelength on my bench (2.6×10⁻¹³ as the paper of record rounds it), which is the model's own arithmetic announcing how far outside its semiclassical domain its headline number stands. Three exhibits, three different physical quantities — a density, a length, a spacing — and one arithmetic shape: premise, fence, ratio. I state the method's five rules, I show what each rule forbids, and I print the failure modes the arithmetic exists to catch: the premise used past its fence with the crossing unprinted, the fence drawn by a neighbouring theory and credited to the premise's own address, and the ratio quoted without the bench inputs that produced it. Grade for this method paper, printed at full size: METHOD STATED AND VERIFIED ON ITS EXHIBITS — a method grade, not a production grade; nothing here derives a physical result, and nothing here is counted as one.