Unfinished, Not Wrong: A Deep-Time Epistemology of Convergent Knowledge — The Floor, the Telescope, and the Baton Between Domains

Abstract. We state the epistemology under which the corpus is built. The claim is simple: the great predecessors were unfinished, not wrong — their mechanisms were incomplete because the tools were not yet available, and deeper tools came later. Since the flat-Earth correction, knowledge has been built upon its floors far more than telescoped back to them; the industrial acceleration sent the accretion outward, into technology wrapped around the snapshot of understanding then in hand, because outward compounds and pays while reconciliation pays only in coherence, on deep time. The great unifications did run — relativity, quantum mechanics — and each reconciled one field to its own deeper floor. A telescoping across domains, to a single shared floor, is the work still open, and it is the one move the corpus makes. The baton it passes between domains is mathematics — the one language precise enough to carry a result intact from the field that found it into another — and the skill it offers is cross-domain interpretation, the reading that asks whether two fields' floors are the same floor. The discipline that keeps it honest is the claim turned forward: we are under-tooled to the next decade as our predecessors were to their own, so the work is a baton in a relay, and "I hope this is outdated in ten years" and "no one is wrong" are the same sentence. We propose; we do not prove. Author: James E. Dunn — Independent Researcher, Hydrogen Lifecycle Research ProgrammeORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-2679-6574Corpus (author search): https://zenodo.org/search?q=creators.orcid:0009-0005-2679-6574SciX (NASA discovery): https://scixplorer.org/search/q=orcid%3A0009-0005-2679-6574ADS (Harvard-CfA): https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/search/q=orcid%3A0009-0005-2679-6574License: CC BY 4.0 International