Regime Compression and Scientific Discovery: How Bounded Inquiry Turns Accumulated Constraint into New Explanatory Structure

Abstract This paper proposes an epistemic architecture of scientific discovery as regime compression under accumulated constraint. It argues that bounded inquiry does not merely accumulate facts; it accumulates constraints inside explanatory regimes. When an existing regime becomes costly, unstable, or contradictory to preserve, discovery often occurs through a new regime that reorganizes those constraints into a smaller, more stable explanatory structure. The paper treats explanatory regimes, rather than isolated theories or observations, as the primary unit of structural change. Paradigms are read as regimes, anomalies as regime strain, theory change as admissible compression, and artificial intelligence as a high-volume generator of candidate regimes whose outputs still require preservation checks. The paper does not define compression as an information-theoretic quantity or claim a new forcing theorem. Instead, it identifies the formal frontier: what object is compressed, what preservation rule distinguishes compression from loss, and what admissibility rule governs transitions between explanatory regimes. The result is a dynamic companion to the Identity–Persistence Program’s static regime-specification frontier: it asks how bounded inquiry may produce new regimes before those regimes enter formal persistence, admissibility, capacity, and verification layers.