If Gravity Is Not Taught, Will Autonomous Science Construct Gravity? — An Experimental Inquiry into Physical Category Generation by Xenoscience

This paper asks whether an autonomous scientific system that is not taught the concept of gravity would nevertheless construct a gravity-equivalent distinction when confronted with physical environments in which gravitational relations produce non-redundant effects. Rather than treating gravity as a concept that must be supplied in advance, the experiment withholds inherited gravitational vocabulary and tests whether the system generates variables, state relations, predictive structures, or intervention rules that recover the operational work ordinarily performed by gravitational theory. Physical category generation is evaluated by whether newly introduced distinctions improve prediction, control, observability, experimental reconstruction, and transfer across changing configurations. The analysis distinguishes the removal of a scientific concept from the removal of the physical relations that motivated it: withholding the word or category “gravity” does not eliminate regularities in acceleration, trajectory, mass distribution, orbital behavior, or differential motion. Xenoscience therefore treats concept formation as an experimentally testable process in which scientific categories ignite only when they become non-redundant for inquiry. The broader claim is that autonomous science should be evaluated not by whether it reproduces inherited human vocabulary, but by whether it independently reconstructs functionally equivalent scientific distinctions where the world makes them necessary.