Foundations
What the programme claims, before any physics. 10 posts, best read in order.
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What the Discovery Plateau Hypothesis Actually Claims
The claim is narrow: bounded systems stop discovering. Everything else in the programme follows from taking that seriously.
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The Human Shannon Number, and Why It Is Not a Boast
Shannon counted chess games. This counts possible knowledge states. The gap between the two is the whole reason the plateau matters.
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Varney's Law: knowledge saturates, and the curve has a shape
A saturated domain does not stop abruptly. It follows a double-damped curve, and later in this archive I derive where that curve comes from.
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Why a bounded civilization would build a multiverse
Not curiosity. If your own discovery space is finite and you need novelty, you have to get it from somewhere with different laws.
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The Forever Machine: what it would take to run one
A novelty-harvesting multiverse is an engineering specification, not a philosophy question. The specification has numbers in it.
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The Universe Complexity Spectrum, from Pong to cosmology
Seven classes of simulated environment, ordered by how much novelty they generate per unit of compute. The economics are counterintuitive.
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Boundary permeability: what a leak between realities would look like
If branches are computational and imperfectly isolated, the failure mode is not an explosion. It is a patterned, low-entropy glitch.
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The Information Conservation Principle
Treat conserved information the way we treat conserved energy, and the Born rule stops being a postulate you have to swallow.
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The Copenhagen-Everett bridge
Copenhagen and Everett have been rivals for seventy years. The wedge between them is one number, and the wedge may not be load-bearing.
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Novelty flux density: the quantity the whole thing is about
Every claim in this programme is ultimately a claim about one rate. Here is what it is, and here is where the original definition went wrong.