What is original in Michael Darius Eastwood's work?
What is original here is a set of quantitative relations, their dated statement and the programme's own measurements, and every one of them is unproven. The components are borrowed, each lender is named, no outside laboratory has tested a relation, and the deciding trials are drafted.
The charge is worth answering in its own words, because most of it is conceded on this site before anyone arrives. The components are borrowed and the site names each lender. The exponent d/(d+1) goes to West, Brown and Enquist in 1997 and to six further groups by name. The difficulty of control goes to Roman Yampolskiy in 2020, four years before the record here. Value-embedded training goes to Constitutional AI in 2022, the orthogonality intuition to Bostrom in 2012, and the matched-compute sequential result to Sharma and Chopra in November 2025.
What is original is narrower and checkable. The specific quantitative relations: the equation with its exponent measured rather than assumed, the co-scaling inequality, and the reciprocal ceiling. Their dated statement, in a source record of 8 December 2024 and in print on 2 January 2026. The programme's own measurements under blinding, published with their intervals. The deciding studies, written, dated and prepared as draft registrations awaiting human submission. And the corrections, published by the author against himself.
Priority here is a claim about a formulation and the date it was first stated in public, never about the underlying mathematics, and every entry names the earlier work its own search found. That is the whole of the priority claim, and it is smaller than a discovery on purpose. Nobody before this programme turned the conjecture into a pre-specified measurement: runnable benchmarks, exponents with intervals, kill conditions filed before the data. The ideas have ancestors. The instrument does not.
The retraction is the method working. An early estimate of 2.24, the most striking number the programme ever produced, was retracted in public when cross-architecture replication did not hold at that magnitude. What replaced it came from the programme's own blinded six-model protocol: roughly 0.49, interval [-1.3, 2.9], printed with the interval every time it appears. A second figure, the earlier Fisher-combined one, was withdrawn because a Fisher combination assumes independence among component tests that was never established. A body of work that contains no corrections is not a body of work.
Conceptual synthesis under a new assumption is how discoveries have been made, and every law is written in borrowed mathematics. Recognition arrives with independent empirical testing, not with the synthesis. This programme's synthesis is stated and dated, 8 December 2024, its deciding studies are written, dated and prepared as draft registrations awaiting human submission, and its own first measurements are published with their intervals and their corrections. No outside laboratory has run a test of it. The illustrations are ordinary history. Darwin joined geology to Malthus and reached natural selection. Newton joined Kepler's sky to Galileo's earth. The relativity papers took equations already written by Lorentz and Poincare and joined them to Maxwell under a new assumption about light. Those are illustrations of a standard, never a comparison with this work, and no claim of that kind is made anywhere on this site.
The book is non-fiction and its author is an independent researcher, with the public record beside the description: OSF DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/6C5XB, ORCID 0009-0004-3222-7442, ISBN 978-1806056200, a dated priority register at /research/priority.json, a falsification register and a corrections log. Whether any of it is credited is not a claim this site makes, in either direction. What it claims is that the record is dated, the tests are printed, and either can be checked without asking the author.