Catastrophic Phase Transitions as Necessary Conditions for Complexity Dissemination: Supernovae, Failed Collapses, and the Persistence of Differentiation in the Universe

The laws of physics do not mandate explosions. Gravity attracts, thermodynamics equilibrates, and the default trajectory of any gravitationally bound system is collapse toward uniformity. Supernovae are counter-natural: local and temporary victories over every dominant physical tendency. This paper asks not why individual supernovae occur, but why catastrophic phase transitions persist as a class of phenomena in any universe where differentiation accumulates across generations of bound systems.

We develop a formal framework establishing that the chemical enrichment of the interstellar medium depends not on the nucleosynthesis of heavy elements inside stars, but on the dissemination event that overcomes gravitational closure. Systems that fail to cross the dissemination threshold — collapsing silently to black holes — contribute exactly zero to interstellar medium differentiation, regardless of their internal nucleosynthetic history. This binary structure is proved in a central theorem with two independent proofs.

A key result concerns the neutrino: the reason core-collapse supernovae can cross the dissemination threshold at all is that the quantum structure of matter provides a transport channel — the weak interaction — that is invisible to the closure mechanism. Gravity traps light, traps ordinary matter, traps everything it can. Neutrinos pass through because matter is mostly empty even at nuclear density, and because the weak force cross-section is sixteen orders of magnitude smaller than the electromagnetic. A universe without neutrinos would have explosion efficiency exactly zero. Its interstellar medium would retain primordial composition forever.

The paper identifies a structural epistemological gap: the composition-weighted failed fraction — the fraction of stellar nucleosynthetic yield permanently lost behind black hole horizons — is inaccessible to any observational program relying on electromagnetic emission. Failed events leave no chemical trace and cannot be counted by detecting their emission, because they have none. This is not a technological limitation. It is a consequence of the binary structure of the dissemination threshold.

A formal fragility result shows that this unobservable parameter controls ISM metallicity linearly: a factor-of-two uncertainty in explosion efficiency propagates to a factor-of-two uncertainty in ISM metallicity at any cosmic epoch. A factor-of-two reduction in efficiency relative to standard models would require approximately 20 Gyr to reach solar metallicity — exceeding the age of the universe.

The paper includes a complete peer review (conducted by an independent AI reviewer) and author response, documenting the full revision history within the manuscript itself.

Keywords supernovae · failed supernovae · core collapse · chemical evolution · nucleosynthesis · neutrino mechanism · dissemination threshold · gravitational closure · phase transitions · complexity · differentiation · epistemology of astrophysics · information physics · galactic chemical evolution · Type Ia supernovae · explosion efficiency · fragility · black holes

Methods Formal mathematical framework with theorem and two independent proofs. Toy models for metallicity-dependent explosion efficiency (Vink et al. 2001 mass-loss scaling, Sukhbold et al. 2016 explosion landscape). Closed-box chemical evolution model for fragility analysis. All numerical codes included in appendix.