# 00 — Research Constitution v0.1
**Cycle status:** FROZEN FOR CYCLE 1 after approval.

1. Question before architecture.
2. Legacy is ancestry/evidence, not authority.
3. Claim typing is mandatory.
4. Scope is part of the claim.
5. Assumptions remain attached.
6. Equations must perform declared mathematical work.
7. Competing explanations and meaningful nulls are required where applicable.
8. Prior-art collision precedes novelty claims.
9. Negative results are canonical knowledge.
10. Unknown is first-class; UNKNOWN/NONE/UNTESTED/UNRESOLVED are not silently conflated.
11. Decomposition is a hypothesis, not an explanation; recomposition must be earned.
12. Cross-domain similarity is not unification; transfer requires mapping and preserved consequences.
13. Representation choices are accountable relative to inquiry.
14. Use the weakest sufficient formal structure.
15. The theory core remains revisable; no ontology is protected in advance.
16. Every major claim must expose what could change it.

Baseline changes require explicit amendment/deviation records. Exploration remains open while the evaluation baseline remains stable.