Physics has two outputs that every other field needs: equations and measurements. The equations describe how physical quantities relate to each other. The Standard Model of particle physics describes the fundamental particles and their interactions through three forces — electromagnetic, weak, and strong. General relativity describes gravity as the geometry of spacetime. Quantum electrodynamics — QED — describes the interaction between light and matter, producing the most precise predictions in the history of science: the electron's anomalous magnetic moment predicted and measured to agreement at fifteen significant digits. Big Bang Nucleosynthesis — BBN — describes the production of light elements in the first minutes after the Big Bang, predicting the primordial abundances of hydrogen, deuterium, helium, and lithium. These equations are published in textbooks, reference papers, and review compilations. They are available to anyone who reads the literature. The measurements provide the numerical values of physical quantities. The Committee on Data for Science and Technology — CODATA — publishes internationally recommended values of the fundamental physical constants on a multi-year cycle. The Particle Data Group — PDG — publishes measured properties of every known particle in the Review of Particle Physics, updated annually. The Planck satellite collaboration published cosmological parameters — the density of ordinary matter, dark matter, and dark energy, the expansion rate, the temperature of the cosmic microwave background — measured from the relic radiation of the early universe. Precision spectroscopy groups have measured primordial elemental abundances in distant gas clouds at high redshift, providing independent checks on BBN predictions. Every measurement is published with its value, its uncertainty, its methodology, and its source. The measurements are available to anyone who reads the publications. The Standard Model has approximately nineteen free parameters. These include three gauge coupling constants that describe the strengths of the three forces, six quark masses, three charged lepton masses, four parameters of the CKM quark mixing matrix, the Higgs boson mass, and the QCD vacuum angle theta. These values are not derived from the theory. They are measured by experiments and inserted into the equations by hand. The equations then produce predictions. The predictions match further measurements, often to extraordinary precision. But the parameters themselves remain unexplained — they are slots in the formalism filled from outside. The open problems of physics have been stable for decades. Unifying general relativity with quantum mechanics — open since the mid-20th century. Explaining why the cosmological constant is 54 to 120 orders of magnitude smaller than quantum field theory predicts — open since the 1980s. Identifying the 95% of the universe's energy content attributed to dark matter and dark energy — named but undetected for decades. Explaining why the Higgs boson mass is so much lighter than the Planck scale — open since the 1970s. Explaining why the QCD vacuum angle theta is measured at zero — open since the 1970s. Each problem has generated thousands of papers, hundreds of doctoral theses, and billions of dollars in research funding. Each remains open. This paper does not propose a new theory of physics. It does not offer a new interpretation of quantum mechanics, a new approach to quantum gravity, or a new candidate for dark matter. This paper proposes an engineering plan to systematically connect every published equation to every published measurement through exact arithmetic with full provenance, producing a global coverage matrix that any person can contribute to, any person can verify, and any person can build upon. A working reference implementation exists. It contains over five thousand tracked values, fifty experiments spanning ten physics domains, 178 derivation steps, and 423 pre-registered comparisons with mechanical verdicts. One of those experiments starts from two integers derived from gauge theory and produces primordial nuclear abundances that match satellite measurements and precision spectroscopy at sub-percent precision — a derivation chain crossing three physics domains that no institutional publication has connected in a single declared, executable chain. The plan uses commodity tools available today — Python, exact rational arithmetic, JSON data structures, and standard software engineering practices. The plan does not require institutional permission, committee approval, or credential verification. The plan produces closure through coverage.
Geoffrey Howland (Fri,) studied this question.