When was the ARC Principle first published?

The ARC Principle was first placed on the public evidentiary record by Michael Darius Eastwood on 8 December 2024, when the U = I x R equation appears at line 9 of the version-2 essay in a self-emailed manuscript. The manuscript was cryptographically timestamped by Google's servers at 02:45:18 UTC (SHA-256 anchor prefix f0d1f38f). The specific named framework 'ARC Principle - Artificial Recursive Creation', holding that intelligence and recursion are the paired forces structuring creation across biological, artificial and cosmic systems, also dates to that anchor.

The first public book articulation is in Infinite Architects (2 January 2026, ISBN 978-1806056200). The first peer-distributed formalisation is Paper I on the Open Science Framework, released on 17 January 2026 under DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/6C5XB, which presents U = I x R raised to alpha as a conjecture and treats alpha of about two as a ceiling proposal rather than as a proven physical law. Paper II, released on 22 January 2026, reports the preliminary empirical work.

The priority is over the specific naming and cross-domain framing under the label 'ARC Principle', not over recursion as a concept, which has extensive prior art in evolutionary theory, self-modifying computation, quantum error correction and the work of Teilhard de Chardin, Wheeler and Smolin. The empirical exponent is treated with honest bounds: an initial 2.24 estimate was retracted; the robust sequential estimate is approximately 0.49; the parallel exponent is approximately zero; the alpha > 1 case is pre-registered as an open prediction.