Literature check: are the strongest claims actually new?

The gap I said volume could not close. Six thousand hypotheses were written without a single literature search. This is the first one. Result: three of four checked claims are already established work, and one appears in the literature almost exactly as I stated it.

1. Method, and its limits

Four claims were selected — the strongest from different sets — and searched. The search was a general web index, not a specialist database, and only the first page of results was read. This is a screening, not a systematic review: absence of a hit means nothing, while a hit is strong evidence of prior work.

2. What was found

Claim	What the search returned	Verdict
H2407 — a three-axis machine carries at most 21 independent geometric error terms	A 2020 paper publishes exactly this: "The 21 GMEs of a three-axis CNC machine tool" (Springer); a 2026 paper treats volumetric error reconstruction as uncertainty-limited (ScienceDirect)	known, standard
Nuclear ridging — ridge pitch equals pellet length	A 1974 study on the influence of pellet length on fuel–cladding interaction in simulated pins (ScienceDirect); pellet shape effects on ridging also discussed in the CNEA literature	known for fifty years
H5846 — radial diffusion coefficients from phase-space gradients are non-unique	Active literature on quantifying diffusive radial transport of radiation-belt electrons and on extraction from phase-space density (Science.gov)	known problem
H2948 — no interlaboratory comparison detects a bias common to all participants	Proficiency-test consensus treated as interchangeable with a certified value for a reference material (Wiley) — the community works on exactly this question	known, and contested

3. What this means for the collection

Four checks, four prior hits. That is not a coincidence and it is not a search artefact — the claims I selected were the strongest, and the strongest claims are the ones most likely to correspond to something real, which means something already known.

The novelty of the 6,000 is now an open question, and the evidence points the wrong way. What was genuinely original was not the hypotheses but the testing: the integral law, the closure-dating penalty, the b-value scale spread, the floating-point threshold error. Those came from running numbers, not from generating ideas.

Two consequences, both uncomfortable:

Volume produced novelty at a low rate. If three of four strong claims are old, the weaker ones are almost certainly older. The 6,000 should be treated as a structured index of known failure modes, which is genuinely useful — and not as a source of new science.
The search should have come first. A day of searching before the first thousand would have redirected the whole effort toward the gaps rather than the crowded ground.

4. What the collection is still good for

The value survives in a different form than intended. An organised list of six thousand ways a measurement can mislead — each with a mechanism and a discriminating test, each tagged by its logical form — is a practical resource even when every entry is already known, because the organisation is the contribution. Someone diagnosing a disagreement can search the list by form ("is this a bound? a degeneracy? a unit trap?") and find the candidates faster than by literature search.

The three tests that produced real numbers remain the only results that would survive a reviewer:

the integral-identifiability law (weightings versus unknowns);
closure dating's third-marker penalty (conditioning 101 → 5,682);
the b-value scale spread, 2.3–3.2× across five magnitude scales in 78,493 real events.

5. Limits

Four claims, one search engine, first page only. This screens; it does not establish novelty either way for the rest.
I did not read the papers — only titles and snippets. Several may differ in detail from my statement.
No negative results recorded except that none of the four came back empty.

If one sentence survives: the first literature search found prior work for every claim tested, which means the 6,000 are best read as an index of known failure modes rather than as discoveries — and the honest headline is that the search should have been the first step, not the last.

Incoprea Research · literature check · 3 November 2026 · the practical 1,200 · reading guide