Records: clandestine scientific motivation

## **The Preservation of What Would Never Come to Pass**

Richard was eternally grateful that his original stint as "Him the II" had been avoided. That said, the time stream went on to create a world that learned from his lessons, *marginally*, but in the process of otherwise living, created amazing life, beauty, art and discovery.

All of that, from Newton to Einstein, from Beethoven to Handel, from Shakespeare to every artist who adapted his stories to their own context... *would never come to pass*. Perhaps the principles might be discovered in a different way and sequence, perhaps other works of great art would be inspired – but the greatness of at least eight centuries would simply never exist.

While the names may fade, Richard ensured their art and creations would live on. His personal mandate: to re-create the body of knowledge lost in the time-stream (as revealed by the F2 Angels) and do it from the ground up. This meant basic physics and all subjects growing out from there.

For the science, the idea was to take principles that were otherwise empirically proven to be valid within a normative frame of reference (i.e.; “What goes up must come down.”).
In particular were experiments reinforcing principles cherry-picked from classical *Natural Philosophy*, such as “atomic theory.” Some of the experiments were incredibly simple, what would’ve been barely above thought experiments – perhaps elementary school science experiments of the 21st century. Some were so fundamental that the experiments actually took a great deal of thought and planning, especially given the utter lack of tools.

## **Deep Geek: the Hand of God in the Details**

The number of *Naturalist Philosophers* on the English RANP rolls was expanding *rapidly*. Most were self-employed, some were “traveling” from Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, Iberia and regions beyond. Some were monks, some were merchants, some were aristocracy and most were of common, red blood.

The directive to recreate the Lost World was already given to a core group of trusted academics. This small group guided the RANP efforts, themselves drawing from knowledge of every recorded experiment in human history from the dawn of recorded history to the late 22nd century. This included the failed experiments as much as the successful ones… and the patterns buried in “dark data.”

The failed experiments were just as important as the “confirmation” ones simply because they were testing the premises of commonly held beliefs (such as: *is health dictated by a balance of* *Humors**?*). They gave the experiments their objective best efforts…

Part of the cultural instruction was creating precedent that encouraged objectivity, conclusions based on observed evidence, that standardized measurement, and creating experiments that had testability and reproducibility. The ideal was to remove ego and avoid Confirmation bias or really any kind of bias, which can involve cognitive bias, cultural bias, or sampling bias. Methods for avoiding or overcoming such biases include random sampling and double-blind trials.

What the RANP was battling went way beyond simple ignorance, there were powers that promoted certain existential narratives. The Church was the obvious suspect, it was the foundation of authority, but it went way beyond them – *to the influence of the F1 Angels*. Closer, it was anybody that took comfort through willful ignorance.

For many, from the 15th century to the 22nd, even when there was evidence to the contrary, there was often a belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).