When Does Xenoscience Abandon a Law and Reconstruct Its World? Operational Failure Discrimination, Lawful Chaos, Generative Temporal Intervals, and Minimally Sufficient Reconstruction

This paper asks when a scientific system should abandon an inherited law and reconstruct the world in which that law had been embedded. Rather than treating anomalous prediction as sufficient evidence of law failure, it distinguishes operational failure from failures attributable to noise, measurement limits, boundary choice, scale, temporal window, hidden coupling, or model misspecification. The paper introduces operational failure discrimination as a procedure for determining when a law no longer provides a minimally sufficient organization of observable and intervention-relevant differences. It further analyzes lawful chaos, in which highly irregular trajectories remain generated by stable lawful constraints, and contrasts this with generative temporal intervals in which new variables, dependencies, or state-space distinctions become necessary for continued prediction and control. On this basis, abandonment of a law is warranted only when no admissible local repair preserves the non-redundant differences required by the relevant scientific tasks. Minimally sufficient reconstruction then identifies the smallest revision of variables, state space, boundary conditions, temporal resolution, or inferential structure capable of restoring prediction, intervention, and explanatory reach without introducing unnecessary structure. Xenoscience therefore treats scientific laws as configuration-dependent constraints whose validity can persist across some forms of anomaly while failing under others. The broader claim is that rational scientific change requires discrimination between lawful irregularity, local operational failure, and genuine world-reconstructive breakdown.