Research constitution

Principles

The founding constitution every EEL network starts from. The prototype enforces in code the principles that can be enforced.

1. Ledger consensus is not truth consensus.The ledger secures who said what, when, and that it was not altered. Whether nature agrees is for evidence and testing to decide.
2. Economic stake cannot purchase epistemic authority.Money, reputation and governance are kept apart, so no one can buy standing for a claim.
3. Evidence can overturn canonical claims.A claim marked canonical is the best-supported current state under stated rules, and it stays open to challenge.
4. Minority branches remain recoverable.Competing models are kept, with their ancestry, and can later displace the incumbent.
5. Falsification is a valuable contribution.Removing an unsupported idea is progress, and a failed experiment counts as work.
6. Replication must be independently attributable.Ten copies from one lab are not ten replications. Independence has to be shown.
7. Provenance cannot be silently rewritten.History is append-only. Corrections are new events that point to what they correct.
8. Scientific claims remain revisable.Every status is provisional and can change when the evidence does.
9. Governance controls procedure, not reality.Shared rules can be voted on. Whether a claim is true cannot.
10. Initial trust may be constituted; enduring trust must be earned.Founding validators start with limited, domain-bounded authority that gives way to reputation earned through verifiable work.