16 Simulator-Grounded Theory Extension

AGENTIC with Executable Scientific Worlds

Chapter 15 ended with Planck’s repair of Wien’s radiation law: an empirical pattern was corrected before its deeper physical meaning was understood. Simulator-grounded theory extension makes the next transition explicit: a proposed relation is realized as a mechanism whose consequences can be challenged by controlled change.

A simulator turns a proposed explanation into executable consequences. It permits controlled interventions and held-out regimes while preserving a clear boundary: success is relative to the simulator unless external evidence is added.

Among the book’s admission environments, a simulator provides the most explicit setting for the complete AGENTIC loop. CLIC can select and interpret controlled interventions; OPTIC can construct the executable probe or analysis workflow; and RELIC can decide which experiment to run next under cost, risk, and time constraints. Their common object would be a versioned simulator-facing theory whose predictions are executed before any claim is made about nature. The experiments reported here test successive component obligations in a ladder called Simulator-Grounded Theory Extension (SGTE), through SGTE–4; the integrated AGENTIC-SIM benchmark remains specified rather than completed.

The corresponding artifact dossier contains the scientific theory, its explicit realization in the simulator interface, transported prior models and measurements, held-out intervention traces, and the exact boundary between simulator-relative and empirical evidence records. SGTE–1 through SGTE–4 populate parts of this dossier under registered simulators. They do not yet construct and admit the complete integrated object, nor transport its interpretation to nature.

The strongest reported construction is SGTE–4: a mediator-shaped latent factor admitted as a predictive factorization inside a supplied one-factor grammar, with closed-world specificity and unsupported-world abstention. Calling the object mediator-shaped is deliberate. Its simulator-relative certificate does not turn its two arrows into causal mechanisms. This boundary distinguishes executable theory construction from the formal construction of Chapter 15 and the source-relative proposals of Chapter 17.