New paper! Science is constrained by physical and economic bottlenecks such as hypothesis testing, especially as many discoveries involve long chains of smaller steps and hypotheses, each requiring validation. As the marginal cost of hypothesis generation goes down, the physical validation cost is likely to remain inelastic in the absence of major investments in scientific infrastructure. Autonomous science is therefore not merely a question of raw capabilities - the allocation of limited validation capacity matters just as much. We argue that this will require deliberately designed markets and institutions, both to allocate scarce validation capacity to the most valuable work and to ensure public good research isn’t crowded out. With @weballergy , @FranklinMatija , @Dr_Atoosa , @vivnat , @alan_karthi , @sindero and I. arxiv.org/abs/2609.31562