Neither Buried nor Believed: The Webb Dipole, Priced

Some claims get answered. Some get refuted. And some get a chair in a waiting room, where they sit for a decade — too strong to throw out, too smudged to hang on the wall. That is where the Webb dipole sits. In 2011, J. K. Webb and his co-authors reported, from archival quasar absorption systems analyzed north and south, that the fine-structure constant, α, varied across the sky in a dipole pattern: Δα/α at roughly the 10^-5 level, with claimed significance of roughly 4σ. Either new physics, or the most instructive systematics case study in spectroscopy. Through the following decade, purpose-built re-measurement by dedicated spectrograph programs — the UVES/HARPS/ESPRESSO era — found no variation at comparable precision. And still the claim was never cleanly retracted or confirmed. The systematics, long-range wavelength distortions above all, are understood well enough to doubt everything and settle nothing. This paper prices that state of the books, and it takes, at full size and on purpose, no position on the archival dipole itself. What my corpus prices is the other side of the address: the laboratory floor. *The Clock-Ratio Census* prices clock-ratio floors — the Yb+ E3/E2 ratio at 3.3×10^-16 — and the μ/ρ against α/α floor comparison: the ground any *local* variation claim must clear. A floor is not a verdict on a telescope archive. Pricing the floor, a claim must clear, is not closing the claim, and I have graded this entry so it cannot be spent as one. Grade for this dead end, printed at full size: PREMISE-ONLY. The program headline stands unmoved: vacuum catastrophe NOT SOLVED / PARTIAL, producing-count 0.