Method, and what the lab learned about doing it
Most of the lab’s early “discoveries” turned out to be known; the part that lasts is its method, kept as 27 lessons in ledger/knowledge/lab-lessons.md.
- Predictions are registered before the data exist, and the commit times are verified.
- A prior-art check runs before any work starts. Of 28 directions checked, 0 were clear, 18 narrow, 6 known, and 4 were dropped.
- Hardware is calibrated on the day of the run, not from the vendor’s snapshots.
- Tests are built so they can fail, and mutation checks show that they do.
- Any scan over many settings gets a trials correction.
- A robustness check has to be sharp, not only smooth.
- Each claim has one canonical record, and its file header carries dated notes when it changes.
- Processes are never killed by name.
Lab records: ledger/knowledge/lab-lessons.md (27 lessons).
Tags: confidence (proved, verified, observed, suggestive, pending) and novelty (known, narrow, ours), defined on the overview.