The Ontology of Phase Transition: Global Reorganization of Constraint Networks at Critical Thresholds

What is a phase transition? Water freezing into ice, iron becoming magnetic, the universe condensing the Higgs field, a paradigm shifting in science, a revolution overthrowing an old regime—all are global, discontinuous reorganizations of a system at a critical threshold. Energy-Efficiency Theory (EET) provides a unified ontological foundation for phase transitions across all scales: a phase transition is the macroscopic manifestation of a constraint network crossing a critical threshold, triggering a collective avalanche of constraint formation (Type I) or meltdown (Type II). This paper develops the complete ontology of phase transition from the generative foundations of EET Core Rules v5.2. At L1, a phase…