Invisible Defect Cascades for Navier-Stokes Regularity

Abstract

We formulate a conditional scale-critical defect-cascade reduction for the local regularity problem of the three-dimensional incompressible Navier--Stokes equations. The theorem concerns a potential singular point for which no sufficiently small dyadic scale enters the Caffarelli--Kohn--Nirenberg smallness regime. Under the structural hypotheses of the framework, such a point cannot be explained by an undifferentiated concentration of energy or pressure. It must lead either to non-effective moving-window observability or to an NS-realizable, cleaned, scale-critical defect cascade invisible to the combined active-pressure, flux, energy, and adjoint-trace tests. The reduction is built from dyadic rescaling, coarse graining, active/harmonic pressure splitting, Reynolds covariance positivity, pressure compatibility, and local energy-flux identities. Finite-window observability reduces possible invisible directions to explicitly defined residual kernels, while budget compatibility and sign coherence convert visible pressure--flux activity into depletion. Consequently, within a controlled window class where dyadic defect extraction, observable depletion, and moving-window growth control hold, effective observability together with exclusion of NS-realizable combined-invisible cascades yields a CKN scale and hence local regularity. The final component interprets the remaining obstruction as a critical recurrence problem and proposes diagnostics for vortex stretching, active pressure work, and interscale flux. Spatially harmonic pressure is retained as a physical local pressure component; only purely time-dependent pressure functions are treated as gauge.