At this point you're suggesting that consensus isn't actually consensus-it's not actually influenced by what sleepers believe, but rather some whims of a strange and changing universe. The Technocracy being possible at all requires things like relativity and the law of universal gravitation to not be things until after they become formal theories. I'd argue that the vast majority of science in the oWoD, when introduced, is vulgar as fuck, and places like CERN and the like are huge Technocratic investments in quintessence and soaked paradox. The scientific consensus is not actually consensus. It's decades more advanced than consensus, a picture of what the Technocracy is guiding society towards. When products made using those theories start showing up in consensus, then that's when something is starting to become consensual, and even then they don't really become embedded into consensus-and something true sleepers can use-until much later.
So a Technocratic rote in this filters down like so:
1. Not even Technocrats can use it, because the Arete 6+ Technocrats haven't decided it's valid.
2. Technocrats can use it, but it's vulgar.
3. The foundations of the rote are laid by some scientists who are enlightened Technocrats.
4. Scientists who are 'merely' hedge mages under the Technocratic paradigm can reproduce it. It's still vulgar here. They demonstrate examples to the public under specific conditions (i.e. inside constructs)
5. The mainstream science or engineering community accepts that these things might be possible. Now the effect is implausible instead of vulgar-it's still 'too advanced' but people might accept it can exist. At some point, after enough exposure, it becomes coincidental.
6. The mainstream science or engineering community creates a shitty version of it. This is still only useable by people heavily immersed in the Technocratic paradigm. Take a look at the earliest microcomputers and how user-unfriendly they were as an example. As it proliferates, it's now more of an 'exceptional device'-it works perfectly in Awakened hands but will generally fail in layman hands.
7. It becomes mass marketed to the sleepers. Sometimes, this is where an effect fails. The sleepers reject it and don't believe it works, the Technocracy goes back to the drawing board as to why it went wrong and find an in-paradigm reason why, which they start to correct (go back to step 4). If not...
8. Now the thing becomes an actual part of the overall consensus.
I'd argue that a lot of Technocratic stuff gets stuck at 6 actually. It works fine in the hands of trained experts more heavily attached to the technocratic paradigm than most, but has huge problems out of that, and the Technocracy sees a lot of things get stuck there basically indefinitely. "Robots are a thing which can make everyone's lives easier," as an example, got to Step 6 back in the 70s but only is starting to get to Step 8 today.
My argument is not that every single physical law was decided by the Technocracy. My argument is that the consensus isn't just Technocratic physical laws, and in fact most of the modern scientific consensus is its own consensus-bubble which is divorced from the masses and slowly diffuses into it-often in forms the Technocracy isn't fully happy with (see the example of pop-culture quantum physics). This creates room for Traditions victories, allows the Technocracy to actually believe what it does, and makes the process of how real science take place make sense in the oWoD context. It also explains much better the difference between what regular people believe about science and what scientists believe about it in the oWoD context.
