Editing Genius The Transgression/Chapter One: The Cosmos (section)

===The Laws of Mad Science===
''"Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain,' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that."

''-Richard Feynman''

What if every failed theory, every idea that didn't pan out, every forgotten and cast-down concept could live again? Because they do, in the mind of a genius, and they come into the world through the hands of a genius. 

To one of the Inspired, every failed and aborted idea is a chance to touch the impossible, and by using those broken equations, those contrapositives and ruined fancies, and channeling Mania through them, she can create miracle-machines. Lemurians believe that this proves their theories, and every Lemurian clings to one or more views of the world that gives power to its Inspired believers. Wrapped up in their own brilliance, they see the answers before them, plain as day, and are unable to acknowledge how and why their ideas fail when separated from Mania.
The Peerage, by contrast, drills its new members in one idea before all others: what a genius does is not real. What a genius thinks when creating a wonder―those strange twisted equations that rain through his mind like confetti―aren't real, they aren't true, and even if they were, the genius has no way of knowing if they are, no external vantage point, neither the capacity nor, ultimately, the desire for objectivity needed to explore the potential truth of such ideas. A peer must learn to use those dead and unborn ideas, rather than be used by them. This is the peers' lesson to their own: mad science is mad, and believing oneself sane is the deepest form of madness.

Mania is unpredictable and produces what geniuses of a theoretical bent call "non-repeatable phenomena"; events that, while they certainly happened, cannot be repeated in a controlled environment, thwarting all attempts at research. Nonetheless, the Peerage has organized a few laws of mad science that provide general guidelines for what the Inspired encounter. These laws are designed to guide a thinker away from Lemurianism and force him to accept one of the Peerage's most important axioms: that geniuses are fundamentally different from sane scientists, and that attempting to engage in scientific-as-such behavior will lead to Lemurianism and/or madness.