"Do as well as Einstein?" Jeffreyssai said, incredulously. "Just as well as Einstein? Albert Einstein was a great scientist of his era, but that was his era, not this one! Einstein did not comprehend the Bayesian methods; he lived before the cognitive biases were discovered; he had no scientific grasp of his own thought processes. Einstein spoke nonsense of an impersonal God—which tells you how well he understood the rhythm of reason, to discard it outside his own field! He was too caught up in the drama of rejecting his era's quantum mechanics to actually fix it. And while I grant that Einstein reasoned cleanly in the matter of General Relativity—barring that matter of the cosmological constant—he took ten years to do it. Too slow!"

"Too slow?" repeated Taji incredulously.

"Too slow! If Einstein were in this classroom now, rather than Earth of the negative first century, I would rap his knuckles! You will not try to do as well as Einstein! You will aspire to do BETTER than Einstein or you may as well not bother!"

Jeffreyssai shook his head. "Well, I've given you enough hints. It is time to test your skills. Now, I know that the other beisutsukai don't think much of my class projects..." Jeffreyssai paused significantly.

Brennan inwardly sighed. He'd heard this line many times before, in the Bardic Conspiracy, the Competitive Conspiracy: The other teachers think my assignments are too easy, you should be grateful, followed by some ridiculously difficult task—

"They say," Jeffreyssai said, "that my projects are too hard; insanely hard; that they pass from the realm of madness into the realm of Sparta; that Laplace himself would catch on fire; they accuse me of trying to tear apart my students' souls—"

Oh, crap.

"But there is a reason," Jeffreyssai said, "why many of my students have achieved great things; and by that I do not mean high rank in the Bayesian Conspiracy. I expected much of them, and they came to expect much of themselves. So..."

Jeffreyssai took a moment to look over his increasingly disturbed students, "Here is your assignment. Of quantum mechanics, and General Relativity, you have been told. This is the limit of Eld science, and hence, the limit of public knowledge. The five of you, working on your own, are to produce the correct theory of quantum gravity. Your time limit is one month."

"What?" said Brennan, Taji, Styrlyn, and Yin...

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