Most systems that try to reference themselves across time, scale, destroy themselves.

The failure modes are boringly consistent:

runaway growth

collapse

phase drift / incoherence

What’s unusual is not that systems fail. It’s that any survive at all.

The document is an attempt to characterize the survivors.

When you formalize “recursive self-reference without accumulating error,” you get a hard constraint on scale ratios. In the simplest nontrivial case:

λ² = λ + 1

with φ as the only positive fixed point.

I’m not claiming this is a new law, and I’m not appealing to aesthetics, biology, or teleology. This is a structural claim:

recursive systems are extremely fragile, and only a narrow class avoids blowing up, collapsing, or decohering.

The note shows the same constraint and the same failure modes appearing in places that normally don’t talk to each other: fixed points, fluid modes, learning systems, biological loops, and self-models.

If this is wrong, it should be easy to falsify.

A single counterexample — a recursively self-referential system that’s provably stable outside this constraint — would break the entire framing.

I haven’t found one yet.

Actual Title: "One Equation, ~200 Mysteries: A Structural Constraint That May Explain (Almost) Everything"