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

===The Law of Broken Theory (aka Popper's Little Secret)===

Geniuses are not scientists and once a genius catalyzes he will never again do science as he previously understood the practice. His Mania makes that impossible. Geniuses aren't clear what Mania is, but it's clear that the stuff gets into a genius, changing his perspective and disrupting how he relates to the world. In short, it drives him mad. Not the full-on delusional insanity of an unmada or Lemurian, or the alien psychopathy of the Illuminated, but Mania changes a genius enough that he is no longer in sync with the rest of humanity.

This law comes in strong and weak forms, and different peers favor different interpretations. In the strong form, favored by more traditional or mystically inclined peers, what geniuses do is literally impossible by the laws of this universe. They concern themselves with higher―perhaps transcendent―laws, and by the standards of mundane reality, they are wonder-workers in a literal sense, able to do the impossible.

Geniuses who favor the weak interpretation, by contrast, say that geniuses' wonders still conform in some sense to the laws of physical reality, but that the corollary conditions of Inspiration still bar a mad scientist from sane research. Science―science as an enterprise, the thing that gave us the atom bomb and penicillin and square watermelons―requires a number of elements for it to function: trust, communication, and skepticism are all vital components. The Inspired struggle with all three, meaning that as a body, geniuses can't engage in "science" as an activity.

Regardless, it's not as simple as geniuses being regular scientists with unique perspectives. Geniuses deal with non-repeatable phenomena and with deep weirdness, and reliable research is extremely difficult for the Inspired. When a genius uses a theory about the universe to build a wonder, her hypothesis might remain internally consistent, but it will also face competition from other hypotheses that are apparently equally valid. For example, let's say a Progenitor builds a healing machine based on her ideas of Orgone Energy. The genius tests the machine, and it 1) works and 2) confirms the genius' hypothesis about how the universe works. But then another genius comes along with a device that functions in precisely the same way, but he based it on completely different principles. He's muttering something about "quantized life force." But his principles are also consistent. Neither theory can be falsified with reference to experiments run with the other genius' wonder, yet both theories are, obviously, inadequate to explaining the true nature of the phenomenon, which allows both the Orgone Healer and the Quantized Life Energy Healer to exist. And if the two geniuses reconcile their theories ("seen from a ninth-dimensional perspective, quantized energy looks like Orgone Energy; the transformations become mathematically trivial"), a third genius comes along, and her healing 
machine uses nanomachines that have no place in either theory...