"How you'd get what to work? Electricity? It's, um, actually I have no good reason to believe I know anything about anything but I guess you could get a book about it? Actually, I want an explanation of electricity so I can check if it sounds like what I've heard already - do you have one of those that's safe for me?" For that last bit he turns to ask Bar.

Just a moment please. And a moment later, An Introduction to Electrical Engineering.

"Thank you!"

It's no trouble.

"You can read over my shoulder if you want but I'm probably just going to skim the beginning."

Lean.

It starts out by explaining how approximately every modern convenience runs on electricity and that people discovered how to harness electricity by performing experiments. This part is not of great interest to Valerie and also there's not a whole lot of elaboration on the experiments. Next it explains the construction of the atom, which is also not new to Valerie but confirming that it's not new is the point.

Incredulous sporfle.

"Hm?"

"Experiments! Really? Like, in the most trivial sense at some point they implemented things and it turned out that they worked, but it's kind of a loose sloppy way to use the word."

"...What's the precise way to use it?"

"It's a science fantasy thing, trying things over and over and over again like the universe would never dream of tiring of you no matter how unwilling you are to take a polite no for an answer."

"Like Thomas Edison inventing the light bulb? Supposedly he tried a hundred things and afterward he said it wasn't a waste because now he knew a hundred things that aren't how you make a light bulb. Supposedly. If I haven't been lied to."

"I mean, I could see somebody writing that as a line in a cartoon."

"Is there anything short and safe for me to read about whether it's true that that’s how light bulbs were invented?" he asks Bar.

Bar can come up with a biographical booklet that might be swiped from a museum or something about the invention of the lightbulb.

It doesn't specifically include the quote he was thinking of but it does include quotes like "I tested no fewer than 6,000 vegetable growths, and ransacked the world for the most suitable filament material." It does repeat the claim that he engaged in experiments.

"I didn't know they had a different kind of electric light before," says Valerie, who finds the information about arc lighting newer and more interesting than the obvious fact that science involves experiments.

"Did he survive this process or is this like, he died in a fire after his epic sacrifice and his apprentice pulled the final design from the wreckage and miraculously it still worked, or something?"

"...Looks like he invented the bulb in 1879 and was still around to want a new lab in 1884? Oh, died 1931, that's decades later. Why?"

"That wouldn't work on my plane at all but I guess maybe there's a science fantasy plane."

"A what plane?"

"Science fantasy. Like, we have stories where you can do experiments and that just works fine, and that's called science fantasy; but on my plane it does not work that way in real life."

"...I think that’s how it works where I’m from? I mean, I think people’s labs catch fire sometimes, but not... you wouldn't just randomly expect any inventor to have died of their lab catching fire the first time they tried to do any experiments? I wouldn't really know but it seems like that's not something I was lied to about?"

"That's really cool."

"I... guess so?"