--- title: "The hypotheses have no end, 2026" type: essay status: draft date: 2026-10-18 topics: "Pirsig,science,closed source,agents" pages: 1 related: [../DERIVATION.md, ../BIO_ROBERT_PIRSIG.md, ../notes/202610181353-pirsig-infinite-hypotheses-science-does-not-close.md, ../notes/202610181354-open-source-first-for-science-after-pirsig.md, ../.claude/skills/essay-montaigne/SKILL.md] --- # The hypotheses have no end, 2026 *A draft. Claude derived it from the owner's notes ([`DERIVATION.md`](../DERIVATION.md)). Each "I" below stands on a note that the owner gave; where a note is missing, a marker says what the owner has to write. It is written in October 2026 and it says how things look this month.* A colleague of mine planned to write code for a contract with a large company, all of it sealed. I told them that private code has no value in the long run, and private science has none either. I said it as a forecast, and I had no proof. **[AUTHOR ANECDOTE: what the colleague answered, and what they did.]** I have looked since for the reason under the forecast, and I found it in the book that I go back to most. When Pirsig was a student of biochemistry, he asked where hypotheses come from. His answer cost him his grades: "The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite." The method was meant to pick one truth out of many. In his hands it did the reverse: "Instead of selecting one truth from a multitude you are increasing the multitude." He wrote that in 1974, about one laboratory and one young man. I read it as a sentence about closed source. If the hypotheses have no end, science has no end, and no single laboratory can test all of it. A sealed method can be tested by one owner only. Everybody else must trust it, and trust is not a test. So I put open source first for science, before I put it for business. That is my step, not his. He wrote about the method, not about code, and he died in 2017, before any agent wrote a line. Agents are what make the step urgent for me. This month an agent writes a hypothesis, the script and the test in minutes, and another one copies a model by asking it questions. The multitude that frightened Pirsig now grows at the speed of a machine. A closed laboratory adds to it and lets nobody prune it. Yet I do not know that I am right. A closed laboratory may have found true things that nobody outside could have tested, and I have not looked for them. Perhaps the field is too large for any of us, open or closed. What do I know? That he asked a question and could not close it, and that I cannot close mine either. I will read this page again in October 2027. ## Sources - The colleague and the forecast: [private code and private science lose their value](../notes/202610132127-private-code-and-private-science-lose-their-value.md). The owner's words. - Pirsig's question and his grades: [`BIO_ROBERT_PIRSIG.md`](../BIO_ROBERT_PIRSIG.md) (Wikipedia, revision 1377828662). - The two sentences: Pirsig, *Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance* (Morrow, 1974; ISBN 0688002307), chapter 10, p. 107 for the first, as checked in [the literature note](../notes/202610181353-pirsig-infinite-hypotheses-science-does-not-close.md). Status: partial. - Open source first for science: [the owner's position](../notes/202610181354-open-source-first-for-science-after-pirsig.md). - An agent copies a model by asking it questions: [what is distillation](../notes/202610151812-what-is-distillation.md). - "What do I know?": Montaigne, *Essays*, "Apology for Raimond Sebond", in Cotton's translation (Project Gutenberg, eBook 3600).