Where CORA Fits: a system of record above the floor it stands on
Stewart Brand, describing how complex systems survive, compressed the whole idea into four words: "Fast learns, slow remembers." A healthy system is layered by speed. Its fast layers move, propose, and innovate in the moment; its slow layers hold steady underneath and keep the memory. A beamline is almost all fast layer. The motors move, the detector reads out, the control system acts, and the data lands, all at once. What it has rarely had is a slow layer, the one whose only job is to remember, faithfully and for a long time, what the fast layers did and why.