The Universal & Atomic Elements of Organization
A falsifiable scientific theory proposing that the same irreducible structures organize both thought and reality — from the quantum to the social scale.
O-Theory proposes that four irreducible structures — Distinctions, Systems, Relationships and Perspectives (DSRP) — form the universal grammar of organization. Rather than being merely useful ways of thinking, these structures are hypothesized to be the atomic elements from which every organized phenomenon emerges, whether in cognition, biology, physics, mathematics, society, or the cosmos.
| D | S | R | P |
| Distinctions | Systems | Relationships | Perspectives |
| Identity ↔ Other | Part ↔ Whole | Action ↔ Reaction | Point ↔ View |
| D := (i ↔ o) | S := (p ↔ w) | R := (a ↔ r) | P := (ṗ ↔ v) |
This is a living scientific evidence compendium: an open, continually evolving collection of independent empirical research, formal theory, mathematical proofs, cross-disciplinary analyses, applications, critiques, and proposed falsifications. Every entry is included because it supports, refines, challenges, or attempts to falsify the theory.
Scientific theories are strengthened not only by evidence that confirms their predictions, but also by surviving attempts to falsify them. This compendium brings both together: independent evidence from researchers who were not testing DSRP and proposed counterexamples evaluated against the formal theory.
One counterexample is enough to falsify O-Theory. Until then, the question remains: do the same four structures organize everything from quantum systems to human thought?
Independent convergence is one of the strongest forms of scientific evidence because researchers arrive at the same conclusion while investigating different questions for different reasons.
The number is not the point. Researchers in different fields, studying different questions with different methods, repeatedly arrived at the same structural predictions—almost always without testing DSRP or using its language.
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This compendium began as the peer-reviewed literature review “A Literature Review of the Universal and Atomic Elements of Complex Cognition,” published in the Journal of Systems Thinking with 109 studies. That paper is the peer-reviewed foundation. What you see here is its living, continuously updated version . New studies are checked before they are added, and the collection now holds and keeps growing. Open any card to see what the researchers found, why it bears on DSRP, and where the original review discusses it, the fuller account.
The collection is updated continuously, so the citation carries the date you consulted it rather than a study count — the count changes weekly, and putting it in the reference would make the same collection look like a different work to everyone who cites it. To cite a single claim or study, use its own address: every one has a permanent link.
This is the adversarial half of the compendium. Where the evidence track asks what converges on DSRP, this one asks what would end it: a single organized phenomenon whose structure needs a fifth pattern, a ninth element, or a fifth structural dynamic. It holds written up from candidates across territories, and resolutions — the general answers those cases settle against. Every case is published whether it held or failed, including the ones still open.
Cite this rather than the evidence collection when the point is what survived attack. The two are separate works with separate addresses: one asks what converges on the theory, the other asks what would end it, and a reference to the first does not support a claim about the second. Case and resolution numbers change when the record is revised, so cite a case by its own permanent link rather than by number.
This collection is meant to keep growing. Send us a study, paper, book or critique that bears on DSRP, whether it supports the theory or cuts against it, and we will read it and decide whether it belongs.
Authors Holm et al.
Year 2026
Publisher Nature
Discipline Astronomy
Secondary disciplines Cosmology
Read it at the publisher 10.1038/s41586-026-10878-w
The dark matter content of ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDGs) is the subject of considerable debate 1–5 . Stellar streams, which form when a host galaxy tidally strips stars from an orbiting stellar system, provide a powerful technique to constrain the dark matter content of external galaxies 6 . The stripped stars form long, thin leading and trailing tidal arms that persist for billions of years. Stellar streams from globular clusters (GCs) are particularly sensitive probes of dark matter halos and substructure 7–10 . GC streams are expected to exist in a variety of host galaxy types 11,12 but, so far, they have only been observed in the Milky Way (MW). Here we present evidence for the first, to our knowledge, extragalactic GC stellar stream, identified in deep Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging of the UDG UGC 9050-Dw1. The stream’s morphology, colour and apparent association with a compact source support the GC progenitor interpretation observationally and we reproduce the observed surface brightness with simulated GC stellar populations. We use generative stream modelling, which fits dynamical models directly to the stream morphology, to constrain the mass of the progenitor and present the first stream-based halo constraint for an UDG. The stream models point to a GC origin and suggest a massive dark matter host halo. By extending the reach of GC stream analysis to external galaxies, this work opens a new chapter in dark matter science.
Astronomers detected the first globular-cluster stellar stream found outside the Milky Way, in ultra-diffuse galaxy UGC 9050-Dw1 (~115 million light-years away), and used the stream's shape to model the galaxy's gravitational potential and estimate its dark matter content.
A visible part (a thin stellar stream) is used to infer the invisible whole (the galaxy's total gravitational mass), with the gap between visible and total mass read out as dark matter.
Patterns it shows D, S, R
Added 2026-08-16
How to cite this Holm et al. (2026). Evidence for the first globular cluster stellar stream beyond the Milky Way. Nature.