Future Sciences / Reading room
A register of papers, instruments, research questions and imagined scholarly controversies. Some can be tested in the browser; others invite a different experiment.
Under development / Two working specimens
A scientific argument heard through incompatible instruments. A simple optical effect you can change with your own hands.
01
A station registers two closely spaced discharges. A rapid detector counts both; a slow integrator reports one sustained episode. The meeting must decide whether the disagreement concerns the world or the word event.
02
Three colored lamps illuminate an object and a white screen. Turn off any lamp or move the obstruction to see why blocking red leaves a cyan shadow.
Specimen register
Research documents from possible futures sit beside real demonstrations, unfinished arguments and experiments still worth attempting.
Natural history / Artificial worlds
A field key groups moving compartments by the direction of chemical exchange. When the supply gradient reverses, the same structure appears to become two specimens. The guide admits that reproduction has not been observed.
Proceedings / Comparative cognition
A station registers two closely spaced discharges. A rapid detector counts both; a slow integrator reports one sustained episode. The meeting must decide whether the disagreement concerns the world or the word event.
Cabinet / illustrated experiment / Optics
Three colored lamps illuminate an object and a white screen. Turn off any lamp or move the obstruction to see why blocking red leaves a cyan shadow.
Research abstract / Ecology
Two enclosed biospheres contain organisms with superficially similar transport systems. The imagined taxonomist compares their developmental histories before grouping them; functional resemblance alone cannot establish descent.
Scholarly dialogue / Linguistics / philosophy
In a hypothetical language that distinguishes ongoing processes from completed events, a laboratory warning becomes ambiguous after translation. The correspondents disagree over whether a prediction can be called fulfilled before its endpoint is known.
Interactive idea / Metascience
Remove a hypothetical discovery from a fictional bibliography. Later citations may then refer to experiments that could never have taken place.
Real research proposal / History / metascience
Proposed study: restrict an investigator to an earlier archive and assess whether a later finding could have been derived without leaked knowledge of the result.
Philosophical science / Consciousness / identity
A mind remains active for twelve seconds. Between intervals, observers interpret its archived statements as evidence of continued intention, although the scenario supplies no uninterrupted memory. A philosophical paper disputes their criterion.
Worlds Studio / Alternative physics
A proposed atmosphere notebook varies gravitational acceleration while holding temperature and molecular weight constant. Each parameter choice yields a different hydrostatic pressure profile; circulation and radiative effects are explicitly outside this first model.
Cabinet / object catalogue / Measurement / art
A caliper that measures coincidence requires a rule for deciding which pairs of events count as comparable.
Alternative-history specimen / Chemistry
An imagined 1935 chemist describes mineral partitions that reform while reagents continue to flow through a chamber.
Fictional scientific archive / Metrology
The Pelagic stations seemed to confirm one another. Their signals shared an environmental timing correction that invalidated the claimed replication.
Environmental hearing / Hydrology / law
Two boundary commissions agree on the water volume and disagree on where the lake begins. One uses the shoreline at low tide; the other uses a salinity contour that crosses the customs road after winter rain.
Alternative-history letter / Geomagnetism
An observatory maps auroral bands using magnetic bearings rather than geographic north. A surveyor points out that the coordinate system turns with the disturbance it is meant to locate.
Public inquiry / Metrology / governance
A flood barrier was certified against average pressure. Residents submit recordings of brief pressure spikes that the certified instrument smooths away. The hearing asks which averaging interval the law intended.
Translation correspondence / Linguistics / meteorology
Two forecasting offices disagree over a warning translated into a language whose aspect distinguishes interrupted processes from completed ones. The original alert described a moving front without specifying an endpoint.
Methods note / Cartography / machine perception
A remote-sensing classifier labels a salt pan as a town after a new seasonal road appears. The proposed error study asks whether its reference labels recorded habitation or road geometry.
Permit application / Bioethics / migration
A conservation permit covers frozen cells of an endangered population. The reviewing agency considers whether cultured offspring remain members of the listed population when their microbial partners were not preserved.
Instrument correction / Optics / calibration
Six mirrors reproduced the expected spectrum; the seventh returned a persistent redward displacement. An appendix shows that all seven shared a calibration lamp whose emission line had shifted.
Mathematical correspondence / Logic / representation
A proof is accepted by one research community only when presented as a moving geometric construction. A logician asks which steps survive when the motion is translated into a finite symbolic certificate.
Curatorial note / History of measurement
Several candidate universal constants were really properties of particular materials or instruments. The proposed cabinet would display the apparatus beside each retired number and explain the experiment that displaced it.
Research design / Metascience
A methods proposal for estimating how many negative laboratory trials disappear before journal submission. Its central difficulty is finding a sampling frame independent of published papers.
Archive notice / Astronomy / archaeology
A satellite archive survives after the tracking network fails. Decades later a curator can reconstruct the launch date but cannot distinguish deliberate maneuvers from drag in the final orbits.
Expert testimony / Memory / philosophy
A reconstruction of a dead witness reproduces archived speech with high fidelity. At trial the defence asks whether the system can be cross-examined about events absent from its records.
Field note / Acoustics / biodiversity
A wildlife survey reports silence after a forestry change. Reanalysis finds that microphones were moved behind a ridge and their low-frequency response had never been calibrated.
Counterfactual atlas / Climate science / worlds
Each drawer begins with a different orbital eccentricity or seasonal redistribution of sunlight. Visitors can compare conditional consequences without treating incompatible Earth histories as a single forecast.
Municipal survey / Urban geography
A city grows by repeatedly lifting and relocating its pedestrian paths. The survey department tracks continuity by address while residents navigate by habitual journey rather than parcel number.
Diagnostic case note / Cognition / informatics
An archival service imports a childhood episode into two prosthetic memory devices. Both owners describe the event confidently; the case turns on how the system represents source and ownership.
Taxonomic reply / Marine biology
Genetic barcodes distinguish lineages that fishers have never named separately. A reply argues that the automated taxonomy ignores seasonal forms recorded in oral catch histories.
Expedition report / Thermal physics / cognition
Temperature sensors register a repeating delayed pulse after each landing. One expedition calls the lag communication; another predicts it from subsurface heat diffusion and demands a changed stimulation schedule.
Astronomical field guide / Astronomy / other observers
Investigators inhabit a world beneath an opaque upper atmosphere. They infer orbiting masses from periodic tidal displacement and disagree over how many distinct bodies account for the measured cycles.
Illustrated research question / Philosophy of experiment
Consider a detector that returns accurate measurements with an unpredictable delay. A proposed protocol distinguishes response latency from the time at which the measured event occurred.
Editorial margin notes / Bibliographic science
A later scientific paper cites a result that was only proposed in an earlier edition. Its editor reconstructs how a conditional sentence entered the literature as an established observation.
Forecast dispute / Chronometry / forecasting
Two laboratories forecast the same intervention threshold using distinct definitions of event time. Their probability curves disagree even after identical evidence is supplied.
Materials case study / Materials science
An engineered surface closes mechanical scratches without restoring the original grain boundaries. A proposed lifetime test asks whether repeated healing accumulates hidden failure sites.
Cabinet / mathematical investigation / Computational worlds / philosophy of mind
A close reading of Greg Egan's Permutation City, with an eight-cell automaton whose possible predecessors can all be counted. An unreachable initial state does not necessarily give its descendants a unique history.
Inquiry proposal / Philosophy / digital personhood
A person authorizes a computational Copy and signs permission to run it. Once active, the Copy refuses the experiment. A proposed inquiry separates the consent of the biological original from that of the subsequently instantiated subject.
No entry uses that combination of words and filters.