Ternary Knob Certification Under A Fixed Corridor: Odd/Even Tokens, Zeros, And SoZ

This note defines a small, reusable “ternary knob certification” tool for cases where a controllable directive variable has a natural opposed pair and a true null, . The purpose is to stop treating “the plot changes when the knob is turned” as certification. Instead, a knob is certified only when (i) the opposed settings produce a stable signed response, (ii) the null state physically removes the coupling without postselection, and (iii) missingness cannot be used to fake success. The tool separates three objects that are commonly conflated: the knob state , the signed decision symbol written per attempt, and the bookkeeping zeros that represent no-hit/no-decision under a fixed extraction rule. From a readout token , two derived tokens are formed: an odd (signed-claim) token and an even (leakage/drift) token . A corridor passes only when is stable, stays within a predeclared leakage budget, and zeros remain zeros (yield is logged and charged rather than hidden). Sum-of-Zeros (SoZ) is recorded as a compact starvation diagnostic to justify no-test bands, but it is never allowed to move acceptance lines or rescue failures. The note also specifies a minimal falsifier set (flip-only, disable/null, zeros-stay-zeros, no-threshold-travel, strong-to-weak ladder) and a minimal immutable ledger row schema (capsule_id, contract_id, window_hash, optional seed_hash, Z_state, Y_token, O_token, E_token, SoZ, pass_flag, falsifier_flags), so the tool can be cited as stable infrastructure across application manuscripts rather than re-derived case-by-case.