The Existential Theory of Research: Why Discovery Is Hard

arXiv:2604.19810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can scientific discovery be made arbitrarily easy by choosing the right representation, collecting enough data, and deploying sufficiently powerful algorithms? This paper argues that the answer is fundamentally negative. We introduce the Existential Theory of Research (ETR), a formal framework that models discovery as the recovery of structured explanations under constraints of representation, observation, and computation. Within this framework, we