Whittaker-ET: Quality engineering (STEP 4b), second run

QE run 2 on 2026-10-07 (Opus). This run replaces the first QE run's text. The first run (verdict MINOR) and its recheck are summarised in section 8. Their findings were applied in arbiter.md ("QE revision") and in primer.md.

Why a second run. At 13:03 on 2026-10-07 a sixth document entered the manifest: A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity, Vol. 2, The Modern Theories 1900-1926 (1953). Its 15 digests were written by 13:07. Every review file is older: - facts.json, 12:32 - claims.md, 12:33 - physicist.md, mathematician.md and contrarian.md, 12:02 - arbiter.md, 12:46 - primer.md, 12:40

Each of these files says that Vol. 2 was "not obtained" or "unread".

Inputs read. - _text/manifest.json and _textprep.log. - All 67 digests: the 15 Vol. 2 digests in full, and the 52 others re-read with keyword searches against the downstream files. - The four deep reads in deep/. - facts.json, claims.md, physicist.md, mathematician.md, contrarian.md, arbiter.md and primer.md. - sites.md, the research/ notes and followups.json (A07).

Own checks. - I ran example.py. - I searched the extracted text of Vol. 2, Vol. 1, the 1903 paper and the 1904 paper (_text/*.txt), and read the passages cited below in context.

Tags and page numbers. [read] means a project document, by PDF page; "bk" gives the printed page. [web] means as retrieved by the Investigator. [calc] means computed. In Vol. 2, PDF page = book page + 11 throughout the gravitation chapter. Examples: PDF 160 = bk 149, PDF 181 = bk 170, PDF 195 = bk 184.

Verdict: MINOR

The central verdicts do not depend on Vol. 2. Claims 1-4 are judged against mathematics and modern measurement, and claim 5 against the vacuum physics. Vol. 2 adds no experiment and no derivation that would move any of them.

Vol. 2 does contain the inventor's own later, published view on exactly the questions the arbiter left open: - the speed of gravity; - the scalar theory of gravity; - the aether after relativity; - whether he kept his 1902-03 idea.

No downstream file has read it, and every one of them reasons about it as a missing record ("where the record goes dark", item 1; arbiter "Open questions"; primer §7). That is a coverage and missed-material defect. It can be fixed with deep reads and updates to facts.json, claims.md, the arbiter (a second QE revision) and the primer. The Step 2 reviews do not need to be redone.

Borderline note. If the deep reads find that Vol. 2 discusses Whittaker's own 1902-03 undulatory gravity, or a 1903-1926 test of it, the verdict becomes MAJOR for claim 4. My text search found no such passage (section 3, N1).

The checked numbers and quotations are correct (section 4), and example.py runs. Two small items are left over from the first run's recheck (section 8).

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1. Coverage

Step 0 skipped nothing: there are 67 chunks and 67 digests.

The defect: the 1953 volume is in the manifest and is digested, but it has no facts.json entry and no deep read. Every review file calls it "not obtained" or "unread": - claims.md, Source gap; - physicist.md, line 5; - mathematician.md, line 5; - contrarian.md, line 5; - arbiter.md, line 5 and the "Open questions"; - primer.md, Source note and §9; - facts.json, 1951 summary ("a second volume (not in the folder)").

Its text layer is good. Only 4 of its 330 pages were OCR'd, so this is text that should have been read.

2. Shortcuts

• Defect: Vol. 2 rests on digests alone, and its Chapter V "Gravitation" (PDF pp. 155-200, bk 144-189) bears directly on claims 4 and 5. Section 3 gives the items. Deep reads 1-4 cover them.
• Acceptable. The 1910 edition has digests plus a four-passage comparison with 1951. Vol. 1 chapters outside V, VIII, IX and XIII rest on digests, which suits a historical survey whose relevant passages have been deep-read.
• Acceptable. Vol. 2's chapters on radioactivity, spectroscopy, matrix mechanics and wave mechanics (Chapters I, III, IV, VI, VIII and IX) are peripheral to this project. Digest-only coverage is fine. The exceptions are the zero-point-energy passage and the Cunningham aether passage (N5, N6).

3. Missed material

Every item below comes from the project's own documents. I checked each one against the extracted text [read]. None of them appears in facts.json, claims.md, the three reviews, the arbiter or the primer (checked with grep).

N1. Whittaker's 1953 verdict on the speed of gravity, written by the man who in 1902-03 said it "may be enormously greater" than light. [read: Vol. 2 PDF p.160, bk 149; PDF p.162, bk 151] - On Lorentz's 1900 paper, bk 149: "the assumptions of Laplace's investigation, which led him to conclude that the velocity of propagation of gravitation must be vastly greater than that of light, do not to twentieth-century minds seem very plausible". The footnote cross-refers to "Vol. I, pp. 207-8". - Bk 151: "From 1904 onwards the Newtonian law of gravitation was examined in the light of the relativity theory of Poincaré and Lorentz. This was done first by Poincaré, who pointed out that if relativity theory were true, gravity must be propagated with the speed of light, and who showed that this supposition was not contradicted by the results of observation, as Laplace had supposed it to be." - On gravitational waves, PDF p.194, bk 183: "gravitational waves are generated, which are propagated outwards with the speed of light". - In the whole gravitation chapter, Whittaker never mentions his own 1902 MNRAS note or the 1903 Math. Ann. section 5 part 5. He cites the 1900 Lorentz paper, the 1895 Lehmann-Filhés paper, Poincaré, Minkowski, de Sitter, Abraham, Nordström, Mie and Einstein. A text search of Vol. 2 for "Whittaker" finds his self-citations only at bk 146 (the 1917 small-divisors paper), bk 165 (null geodesics from the theory of characteristics), bk 170 (a 1927 Proc. R.S. A cxiii variational paper), bk 184 (1931), bk 194 (1935, Gauss's theorem and mass in GR), bk 269 (1928) and bk 279 (1940). There is no "Stoney", no "Math. Ann. lvii" and no "Endeavour" [read: text search, not every page verified on the image]. - Bearing: This is a primary datum for the arbiter's "Absence of evidence" item 1 and for "Open question: what did Vol. 2 say about gravity and the aether?". By 1953 Whittaker had published, under his own name, the view that gravity propagates at c, and he called a Laplace-type superluminal speed implausible. That supports explanation (b), "he gave it up as relativity arrived", or (a), "he regarded it as a representation only". It weakens the reading that he still held a superluminal wave gravity in 1953. It does not exclude (c), a private gravity-electromagnetism conviction (Navarro). His silence about his own note is a second datum of the same kind as Vol. 1's (arbiter R5).

N2. Scalar theories of gravity, and why Einstein abandoned the single scalar potential, as Whittaker tells it. [read: Vol. 2 PDF pp. 164, 167-168, bk 153, 156-157] - Abraham (1912) let the light speed c depend on the gravitational potential, with gravity along −grad c. - Nordström (1912-14) gave a scalar theory. - Einstein and Grossmann's ten g_pq: "a tremendous innovation, because it implied the abandonment of the time-honoured belief that a gravitational field can be specified by a single scalar potential-function". - Einstein's stated reason: for radiation in a box, the single-scalar theory gives "only one-third of the work" to raise the radiation in one arrangement compared with another, "a conclusion which was obviously wrong". Whittaker adds that Einstein's "strongest reason" was his conviction about general covariance. - Bearing: This bears on claims 4C and 4E (scalar or longitudinal gravity; a scalar polarizable vacuum). The primer cites Nordström only from [web] (Wikipedia, §3.6). Whittaker's own History is a primary source for this and should be cited [read]. It is also the step that Whittaker's 1902-03 single-scalar-potential picture never had to face.

N3. FitzGerald's "structure of the aether" as Whittaker's own bridge from aether to curvature. [read: Vol. 2 PDF pp. 168-169, bk 157-158] - FitzGerald (1894): "Gravity is probably due to a change of structure of the aether, produced by the presence of matter." - Whittaker: "The 'aether' of FitzGerald was called by Einstein simply 'space' or 'space-time': and FitzGerald's somewhat vague term 'structure' became with Einstein the more precise 'curvature.'" - In a static gravitational field, weak electromagnetic phenomena behave as in a medium whose permittivity and permeability are anisotropic and vary from point to point. For a point charge near a point mass, the law is (r+1)³/r²(r−1). The footnotes credit E. T. Copson, Proc. R.S. (A) cxviii (1928), p. 184 and, for the dielectric reading of FitzGerald, E. Wiechert, Ann. d. Phys. lxiii (1920), p. 301. - Bearing: - This is the inventor's own 1953 statement of "gravity as a property of the medium that carries light", restated as GR. It is the most direct answer in the project's documents to the Q07 "same medium" question, and it belongs beside claim 4E and A07. - The contrarian and arbiter attribute the "medium of variable ε and μ" comparison to Whittaker's 1928 lecture [web: research/2026-10-07-cambridge-synge.md]. Vol. 2 credits the point-charge result to Copson (1928). The two are compatible, because Copson was Whittaker's student and colleague at Edinburgh [memory, medium]. Both should be stated. - It also links to the primer's Dicke-Puthoff material (ε = Kε₀, μ = Kμ₀), as an earlier, GR-internal form of the same analogy.

N4. Lorentz 1900: Le Sage-type gravity from very penetrating electromagnetic waves, rejected because energy would have to disappear. [read: Vol. 2 PDF pp. 160-161, bk 149-150] - Lorentz replaced Le Sage's corpuscles by "trains of electric waves of very high frequency" crossing space in all directions. He found that a net force between two ions "could exist only if in some way or other electromagnetic energy were continually disappearing", and so rejected it. - He then took up the Mossotti/Weber/Zöllner model, in which unlike charges attract slightly more than like charges repel, with (γ−α)/α of order 10⁻³⁵. Eddington later gave a Machian rationale for it (Fundamental Theory, 1946). - Bearing: This is a wave-gravity model from 1900, three years before Whittaker's, built from waves in the light medium. Whittaker records it, together with the energy-budget objection that killed it. It is close kin to claim 4 and to Stoney's 1903 objection. It also extends the Aepinus item that is already in the record (arbiter R4).

N5. Whittaker on the aether after relativity: "an objective aether is not necessarily foreign" to relativity. [read: Vol. 2 PDF p.259, bk 248] - Cunningham (1914) assigned the aether a velocity of magnitude c at every point, so that a stress carries both momentum and energy. Whittaker: "The scheme is relativistically invariant: so that an objective aether is not necessarily foreign to the point of view of the principle of relativity". - The Poincaré-Lorentz chapter also keeps the language "the fundamental equations of the aether" for the vacuum Maxwell equations (PDF pp. 41-44, 51). - Bearing: This is primary evidence for claim 5 ("aether may fitly be retained"), and it is two years later than the 1951 preface.

N6. Zero-point energy and the aether, 1911-1916. [read: Vol. 2 PDF pp. 114-115, bk 103-104] - Planck's second theory (1911-12) gives an oscillator mean energy greater by ½hν, "the first appearance in theoretical physics of the doctrine of zero-point energy". - "In 1916 W. Nernst suggested that the aether everywhere might be occupied by zero-point energy." - Bearing: This is the historical root, in Whittaker's own account, of the 1951 preface's "so rich in physical properties" (zero-point oscillations). It belongs in claim 5 and primer §4/§7.

N7. The Poincaré-Lorentz framing, primary text for Navarro's characterization. [read: Vol. 2 PDF p.51, bk 40; Ch. II title "The Relativity Theory of Poincaré and Lorentz"] - Einstein "published a paper which set forth the relativity theory of Poincaré and Lorentz with some amplifications". The constancy of light speed is "an assertion which at the time was widely accepted, but has been severely criticised by later writers". - The reviews and arbiter cite Navarro (2020) on this [web: abstract only]. The primary text is now in the folder. Navarro's reading, that Whittaker's commitments shaped the chapter, stays as the historian's characterization. Whittaker's own framing should be quoted beside it (SOURCE HONESTY: interested-party framing on both sides).

N8. Faraday 1851, a medium with "other uses than simply the conveyance of radiations". [read: Vol. 1 PDF p.104] - Faraday: "it is not at all unlikely that if there be an aether, it should have other uses than simply the conveyance of radiations". Whittaker: "This sentence may be regarded as the origin of the electromagnetic theory of light." - The same page covers Faraday's 1846 "Thoughts on Ray-Vibrations": light as vibrations of lines of force, with no separate aether. - Bearing: This is the earliest statement in the project's documents of the idea in Whittaker's 1903 sentence "an identical property of the medium ensures their transmission", namely one medium doing several jobs. The digest has it (chunk 15, p.103-104). No downstream file mentions it. It is minor, but it suits primer §4.

N9. Smaller Vol. 2 items [read; digest checked against the text where marked]: - Whitehead's 1922 flat-space theory with action at a distance propagated at c, and Synge's 1952 study of it (PDF p.186, bk 175). - A. G. Walker's 1951 flat-space model, which reproduces the perihelion advance and light deflection (PDF p.192). - Rosen's flat-space mapping (p.186).

These are mid-century alternatives to curved space-time that Whittaker recorded. They are pertinent to the "medium versus geometry" question (claim 4E) and should get one line in the arbiter.

4. Accuracy spot checks

The first run checked eight facts (A1-A8). This run checks five more.

Also confirmed: the reviewers and A07 cite "History Vol. 1 pp. 206-207" in book pages. Vol. 2's own cross-reference, "Vol. I, pp. 207-8" for Laplace (PDF p.160, footnote 5), uses book pages, which supports the convention stated in claims.md [read].

example.py: ran with the project venv in 20 s, exit 0 [calc]. Parts 1-7 print the numbers quoted in primer §5 and the arbiter. These include (2/π)Si(10) = 1.0557, the 18% Gibbs overshoot, the 257-day period, the 4.1e-16 crude GW170817 bound, and the Bjerknes 4d/c table (1996 s at 1 AU).

5. Retention

Nothing pertinent was dropped because a reviewer judged it negatively: - Titleman, Bearden, Barrett, Múnera, Trovon de Carvalho and Rodrigues, Darmos, See, Meyl, Brush, Navarro, McCrea, Stoney, Wangerin, Ibison and Puthoff all appear in the arbiter and/or primer, with sources and stakes. - The Bjerknes/Korn/Larmor material added by the first QE run is in both.

The Vol. 2 gaps in section 3 come from the timing, not from verdicts.

There is one retention risk to guard against in remediation. N1 cuts against a reading that the inventor kept a superluminal wave gravity. Under SOURCE HONESTY it must be stated in full, and it must not be used to drop the 1902-03 suggestion or the "absence of evidence" alternatives. Navarro's account of a lasting gravity-electromagnetism conviction stays beside it.

Retention: pass.

6. Process

• Ordering. A new primary document by the inventor was added after Steps 1b-4 had finished, and Step 4b was run directly. Under prompt.txt the new document should first get a facts.json entry and a deep-read triage (Step 1b) before the reviews are weighed. The remediation below does that.
• Source tags. Present and honest in every file. [calc] is used consistently. Medium-confidence [memory] items that carry no verdict are labelled as such (arbiter "Web checks"; primer §3.5 "7 × 10⁶ c ... [memory, medium], unchecked"). No [memory, low] tags appear anywhere.
• Web checks. The arbiter used 4 of its 8 web calls. The oscillating-g statement is now sourced (PPTA, arXiv 1810.03227). No open process defect remains here.
• Verdict scale. Applied consistently. The arbiter's split for claim 4 (4A-4F) uses scale names exactly.
• Primer.
• It follows STEP 4 §§1-9, with answers at the end.
• Symbols and acronyms are defined (GR, LVK, AU, Si, sgn, tensor in plain words).
• The source gap is repeated.
• The worked example uses real numbers and is reproduced by example.py.
• Its Source note and §9 now need the Vol. 2 update.
• example.py. Runs and matches the primer.
• Investigator queue. The first QE run asked for Korn (1898), Larmor's pulsating-electron gravitation, the Bjerknes publications and Leahy (1884-85) to go into the Investigator's queue. sites.md (Investigator-owned, last written 11:59) does not yet list them. This is carried forward for the next Investigator run. Add: Copson, Proc. R.S. A 118 (1928) 184; Wiechert, Ann. d. Phys. 63 (1920) 301; Lorentz, "Considerations on Gravitation", Proc. Amst. Acad. 2 (1900) 559. sites.md's lead "History Vol. 2 ... needs the owner's approval to download" is now satisfied: the owner has added Vol. 2 to the folder.

7. Remediation

Deep reads (most important first; slugs from manifest.json)

1. 1953-A-History-of-the-Theories-of-Aether-and-Electricity-Vol-2-The-Modern-Theori-264407, PDF pp. 155-200 (Ch. V "Gravitation", bk 144-189). Opus. - Report exactly, with book and PDF pages, what Whittaker in 1953 says about the speed of gravity (Laplace "do not ... seem very plausible", Poincaré "propagated with the speed of light", gravitational waves at c). - Report Lorentz's 1900 wave-pressure and Mossotti-type gravity, and why the first was rejected. - Report the Abraham, Nordström and Einstein scalar theories and Einstein's one-third-work argument against a single scalar potential. - Report FitzGerald's "structure of the aether" and Whittaker's "structure → curvature" gloss, and the Copson (1928) and Wiechert (1920) medium analogies, with the formula on PDF p.169 read from the page image. - Report Whitehead, Synge, Walker and Rosen. - Does the chapter anywhere mention, cite or allude to Whittaker's 1902 MNRAS note or the 1903 Math. Ann. section 5? State how each passage bears on claims 4 and 5 and on the arbiter's "where the record goes dark" item 1.
2. Same slug, PDF pp. 320-330 (index), plus a whole-volume text search checked against page images for every hit. Sonnet. - List every citation of E. T. Whittaker's own work (expected bk 146, 165, 170, 184, 194, 269, 279), with the subject of each. - Confirm or refute the absence of the 1902-03 undulatory gravity, the 1903 and 1904 papers, the 1927 Proc. R.S. A 116 "electric phenomena in gravitational fields" paper and the 1944 Endeavour article. - List every use of "aether" in Whittaker's own voice (not in quotation) after Ch. II.
3. Same slug, PDF pp. 38-56 (Ch. II "The Relativity Theory of Poincaré and Lorentz"). Sonnet. - How does Whittaker frame the aether, absolute rest and the priority of Poincaré, Lorentz and Einstein? - Quote the "with some amplifications" and the "severely criticised by later writers" passages and their footnotes, so that the arbiter can set Whittaker's own framing beside Navarro's characterization (claim 5, interested parties).
4. Same slug, PDF pp. 1-11 (preface and contents), 113-116 (Planck's second theory, zero-point energy, Nernst 1916) and 257-264 (Cunningham's objective aether, Page, Leathem, Hargreaves' 1908 and 1922 potentials). Sonnet. - What does Whittaker in 1953 say about the aether, the vacuum and zero-point energy? - Does any passage on potentials (Hargreaves) bear on claim 3's two-scalar-potential reading?
5. 1951-A-History-of-the-Theories-of-Aether-and-Electricity-Vol-1-The-Classical-The-dc5e18, PDF pp. 103-104 (Faraday, "Thoughts on Ray-Vibrations" 1846 and the 1851 aether sentence). Sonnet. Quote what Faraday proposed about vibrations of lines of force (including whether gravitational lines are named) and the 1851 "other uses" sentence. State the relation to Whittaker's 1903 "identical property of the medium".

What each later file must change

• facts.json
• Add an entry for the 1953 Vol. 2: type book; Thomas Nelson, 1953; how_read "digest (all 15 chunks) + deep reads (pages)"; text_available yes; a summary; key claims from N1-N7 with pages; relevance to claims 4 and 5; sources [read].
• 1951 entry: change "a second volume (not in the folder)" and add the Faraday 1851 sentence (N8).
• README entry: note that its "Vol. 2 ... lending-restricted" lead is now resolved by the copy in the folder.
• claims.md
• Source gap: Vol. 2 is now in the folder and read (state how). Remove it from "Not obtained".
• Claim 4: add one sentence. In 1953 Whittaker's own History records that relativity requires gravity "propagated with the speed of light" (Poincaré), calls Laplace's superluminal assumptions not "very plausible", and does not mention his 1902-03 suggestion [read: Vol. 2 bk 149, 151].
• Claim 5: add the 1953 statements: "an objective aether is not necessarily foreign" to relativity (bk 248); FitzGerald's "structure" became Einstein's "curvature" (bk 157); Nernst's 1916 zero-point aether (bk 104).
• arbiter.md: add "QE revision 2" with these points.
• "Absence of evidence" item 1: add N1 as a primary datum. It supports (a)/(b) for his published view by 1953 and leaves (c) open for private conviction. Update the deciding records: Vol. 2 is now read; the 1944 Endeavour article, the Fisher Library papers and the 1903 press remain.
• "Open questions": answer "What did Vol. 2 say about gravity and the aether?" in part.
• Claims 4C and 4E: add N2, Whittaker's own record of the scalar-gravity theories and Einstein's reason for dropping them. Add N3, the Copson/Wiechert medium analogy, beside Dicke-Puthoff. Add N4, Lorentz 1900, beside Stoney.
• Claim 5: add N5-N7. Set Navarro's characterization beside Whittaker's own framing [read].
• Line 55 (Stoney paragraph): replace "a particle is 'switched on' at t = 0" with "the source changes sign from −1 to +1 at t = 0 (a static −1/r plus a switched-on 2/r)". This was left open by the first run's recheck.
• No verdict name is expected to change. State this explicitly, or state the change.
• primer.md
• Source note and §9 Further reading: Vol. 2 is in the folder and read.
• §1: after "never developed further in print by Whittaker as far as we know", add that his 1953 History adopts the speed-of-light propagation of gravity and is silent on his own note.
• §3.5: add Whittaker's 1953 comment on Laplace and Poincaré's c (N1).
• §3.6: cite Whittaker's own account of Nordström, Abraham and Einstein's one-third argument (N2) beside the [web] Wikipedia citation.
• §4: add FitzGerald → Einstein (N3), Lorentz 1900 (N4) and Faraday 1851 (N8) as context for "an identical property of the medium".
• §7 "Where the record goes dark": rewrite with N1, and keep the three explanations and Navarro.
• The evidence table needs no change.
• followups.json (A07), orchestrator: in "open", replace or qualify "Whittaker's 1944 Endeavour article ... is unread" with a note that Vol. 2 (1953) states gravity propagates at c and does not mention the 1902-03 idea. Add N3 (the static-field ε, μ medium analogy credited to Copson 1928) to "known". Label the source "History Vol. 1 (1951) pp. 206-207" as book pages. Run tools/followups.py check Whittaker-ET.
• sites.md / Investigator queue (next Investigator run): mark the Vol. 2 lead as obtained. Add the leads in section 6, "Investigator queue".
• physicist.md, mathematician.md and contrarian.md: no rewrite needed. Their "Vol. 2 not obtained" lines stay as the reviewers' original text, and the arbiter's QE revision 2 records the correction.

8. First QE run (2026-10-07) and its recheck: status

The first run found the 19th-century pulsation and density models in Vol. 1 (M1-M3), the elastic-solid longitudinal mode (M4), the gravity-speed record (M5), Vol. 1's silence on Whittaker's own gravity idea (M6) and smaller omissions (M7). It also found accuracy slips: the Laplace "hundred million times" figure, the 1902 and 1903 closing sentences, and the book-page convention. All were applied (arbiter "QE revision" R1-R8; primer Parts G and §7; claims.md claim 6; facts.json).

The recheck left two items open. Status now: 1. arbiter.md "switch-on" wording. Fixed at line 12. Still open at line 55 (Stoney paragraph): 'a particle is "switched on" at t = 0'. 2. followups.json A07. Fixed. It now gives sgn(Vt − r)/r, qualifies the Dicke-Puthoff point as "the published scalar Dicke-Puthoff model ... (Ibison)", and lists the Bjerknes/Leahy/Korn/Larmor/Riemann record. One small remainder is the unlabelled book pages in its source list (section 7).

Corrections to earlier documents

1. Every "History Vol. 2 (1953) not obtained / unread" statement is out of date. These are in claims.md (Source gap), facts.json (1951 summary: "a second volume (not in the folder)"), physicist.md line 5, mathematician.md line 5, contrarian.md lines 5, 127 and 133, arbiter.md line 5 and "Open questions", primer.md Source note, §4.8, §7 and §9, and the first qe.md M6 ("Vol. 2 is unread"). Evidence: _text/manifest.json lists "1953 A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity Vol 2 The Modern Theories 1900-1926 (Whittaker).pdf", 330 pages, 15 chunks, extracted 2026-10-07 13:03 (_textprep.log).
2. arbiter.md line 55. "a particle is 'switched on' at t = 0" should read "the source changes sign from −1 to +1 at t = 0 (a static −1/r plus a switched-on 2/r)". The arbiter's own correction (QE revision, item 1) is recorded but was not applied at this line.
3. contrarian.md and arbiter.md "Absence of evidence" item 1(b), "1928 lecture calling the medium analogy 'not quite perfect'" [web]. This is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Vol. 2 (bk 157-158) credits the point-charge "medium with varying ε and μ" result to E. T. Copson (Proc. R.S. A 118, 1928, p. 184) and the dielectric reading of FitzGerald to Wiechert (1920) [read]. State both.
4. primer.md §1, "was never developed further in print by Whittaker as far as we know". This still holds for the idea itself, but it should add that Whittaker's own 1953 History states that relativity requires gravity to propagate at c and treats a Laplace-type superluminal speed as implausible (Vol. 2 bk 149, 151) [read].
5. The first qe.md, M6 ("Vol. 2 is unread, so this is no proof of anything"). The text search of Vol. 2 also finds no mention of the 1902-03 idea (N1). The silence now covers both volumes, pending deep read 2's page-image confirmation.

Files: review/Whittaker-ET/qe.md

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Recheck

Recheck (Sonnet), 2026-10-07, after remediation. I checked the current claims.md, facts.json, arbiter.md, primer.md, followups.json, sites.md, the three reviews and deep/1953-...-264407.md by text search and context reading.

Defects (sections 1-3)

Remediation actions (section 7)

Section 8 items from the first QE run

1. arbiter "switch-on" wording at the Stoney paragraph: Fixed (see above).
2. followups.json A07: the sgn(Vt-r)/r and Dicke-Puthoff points were fixed earlier. The unlabelled book pages remain (counted with the A07 item above).

Corrections to earlier documents

All five are recorded in the arbiter (QE revision 2) and claims.md. Correction 1 is applied in claims.md, arbiter, facts.json and primer. Correction 2 is applied. Correction 3 (Copson and Wiechert beside the 1928 lecture) is applied in the arbiter and primer. Correction 4 (primer 1) is applied. Correction 5 (silence now covers both volumes) is applied in the facts.json and primer text. Stale "not obtained" copies remain only in the three reviewer files, by design.

Open issues

1. followups.json A07 not updated with the Vol. 2 finding, the Copson item and the book-page label.
2. sites.md / Investigator queue not updated (deferred to the next Investigator run).
3. Deep reads 2-5 not run. The Vol. 2 index and self-citations, Chapter II framing, the Planck/Nernst/Cunningham/Hargreaves passages and the Faraday pages rest on text-layer reading and the digests. This is disclosed. It does not affect any verdict.

Final: OPEN (3 issues)

Orchestrator 2026-10-07 (after Vol. 2 recheck): applied open issue 1 (A07: Vol. 2 speed/silence item, Copson item, Vol. 1 source labelled book pp. 206-207, PDF p. 110). Issue 2 deferred to the next Investigator run; issue 3 is a disclosed gap with no verdict impact.

Final: PASS (issues 2-3 deferred, disclosed)