On the Evidence Against Curved Space

I first stumbled onto Miles Mathis’s website in May of 2012, when I googled the words [“variable acceleration” newton leibniz]. I was impressed with his intuitive choice of words and his willingness to go deep into the history of science’s historical development, but was taken aback by some of his claims. Most of mainstream physics in the 20th century has fundamental mistakes, including Einstein? I had always thought science was based on objectivity, and therefore somewhat immune to mistakes of the scale Mathis was claiming. However, the writing style and historical arguments resonated so strongly with me, that I have kept reading.

It is becoming more and more clear to me that my initial intuitions were right about Miles Mathis's work. There's actually been an organization for the last 20 years that has been saying many of the same points. I still highly recommend Mathis’s work for historical and social perspectives and intuitive insight. Here I will present some other writings I have found, which I believe provide enough evidence for anyone to begin to question the mainstream acceptance of Einstein’s Special Relativity, which postulates that space itself is curved.

I do not claim that anyone has disproved the idea of curved space. I just claim that the idea of curved space is but one possibility among several. Other theories agree with the same degree of accuracy to the experimental evidence. Light moves too fast for any of the experiments performed to date to determine which theory is best.

Special Relativity grew directly out of the assumption that observers in separate frames of reference will interact with the same rays of light. Another possibility is Curt Renshaw's Radiation Continuum Model, which theorizes that light is emitted in a continuum of velocities. In this theory, observers in separate reference frames interact with separate rays of light, so that the only light they see would be light that is travelling at speed "c" of 186,000 miles/sec as James Clerk Maxwell's set of equations predicts.

The best evidence that theories like Renshaw's, which are currently shut out almost completely from American universities, deserve more attention, is probably the words of Nikola Tesla written in 1932, 27 years after Einstein first published the theory: 

I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. . . Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view. - http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1932-09-11.htm

Tesla and Einstein had no grudges. Einstein actually sent Tesla a birthday card in 1931. Tesla simply felt that Special Relativity was wrong, and held this view until his death in 1943. Granted Tesla was somewhat of a showman who enjoyed giving entertaining quotes to newspaper journalists, but he would have personally gained much more media attention by connecting himself to the media storm generated by Arthur Eddington’s alleged 1919 confirmation of Einstein’s theory. Unlike other claims Tesla made to the media of his outlandish experimental achievements, his theoretical disagreement with Special Relativity is unquestionably genuine.

Tesla almost unquestionably understands electromagnetism as well as anyone in history. Does anyone else find it odd that the man who understood electricity better than Edison and was the first to invent the radio, rejects the mainstream theory of how electromagnetic waves travel through space? There seem to be two possibilities. 1. Tesla is wrong, and just got lucky with his (multiple, groundbreaking) inventions. 2. Tesla is right, and the mainstream theory is wrong.

What about all the experimental verifications of Einstein's theory though?
Experimentally "proving" the accepted theories of mainstream academia is the name of the game in theoretical scientific research, today, so many alleged experimental verifications of special and general relativity have been written. In researching this topic, I was surprised to learn that the speed of light was actually first discovered and measured in the 1600's, by observations of the delayed intervals in the eclipses of Jupiter's moon, Io. We have known about the problem of light's finite speed for nearly 350 years, but it is only in the last 150 that anyone has paid it any attention! It turns out the speed of light is so fast, that we can ignore it and pretend it is instantaneous when predicting things here on earth. Some engineers have claimed that relativity is used in GPS satellites. But in practice, as is admitted by the GPS.gov website, they do not.

As crazy as it seems to think that mainstream science could get something like this wrong for coming up on 100 years, all the alternatives I have explored seem crazier.

Mathematically the problem is simple to describe. The point of contention is the definition of "motion" in the fundamental equations of electro-dynamics (velocity in the Lorentz Force equation, F = qv x B; current in Faraday’s law of induction and the Biot-Savart law.) The question is "velocity relative to what?” or, equivalently, “from whose perspective is the flow of the current to be measured?” (For more, see this page.) Equivalently, in regards to Maxwell’s equations, we could ask “should the derivatives in Maxwell’s Equations be partial derivatives with respect to time, or total derivatives with respect to time and motion?"

Explaining the history of why this question was never resolved is much more complex. First we must discuss the historical context out of which Einstein’s Special Relativity arose.

The story starts with James Clerk Maxwell, who formulated the first system of equations to accurately describe the interaction between electricity and magnetism.

The original significance of Maxwell’s equations, first published in 1861, is that it predicts that electromagnetic waves propagate at the speed of light, suggesting that light itself is just one of many forms of electromagnetic radiation.

During the 1820s-60s when these laws were first being formulated, the question of relative velocity was a non-issue. For any real experiment the ground, i.e. the motion of the earth, is the obvious choice of reference frame, so the question “velocity relative to what?” would have been too trivial to ask.
 
Maxwell believed that electromagnetic waves traveled in the absolute frame of a luminous ether. Therefore he, and most other scientists of his time, believed that the velocity between the earth, and the ether through which electromagnetic waves travelled, should be detectable by a sensitive enough experiment.

Thirty years later, after repeated experiments failed to detect the ether wind, physicists began to be at a loss for a workable explanation for how electromagnetic waves travel.

This question of “relative velocity” has become so ingrained in the fabric of mainstream physics today, that books will claim, as this one does,

“There is no way in which the ideas of ‘fixity’ or ‘motion’ can be ascribed to a field. The velocity u in the Lorentz formula is not ‘velocity relative to the field’ but ‘velocity relative to the observer’; for another observer with relative motion, E, B, and u would be different, yet in such a way to make F (the Lorentz force) the same.”

Pg. 6 of my second-year college physics textbook makes the same argument:
As if the situation where observers have different velocities is an everyday occurrence while conducting scientific experiments! Can you imagine being in a laboratory trying to take measurements from two frames of relative motion? The vast majority of all scientific experiments have been observed in the reference frame stationary to the laboratory building.

So how did the question of “velocity relative to what?” become so ingrained in the syntax of of 20th century physics, given that it is in actuality quite irrelevant to physics?

When the Michelson-Morley experiment failed to detect the expected “ether wind,” physicists were ready to accept almost any explanation. Lorentz tried to preserve the ether concept while also rationalizing the null results of the experiments.

Curt Renshaw writes:

It is important to consider the context of Lorentz's work. Faced with the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment and with the incredible success of Maxwell's equations, Lorentz had to find a way to reconcile the two. The Lorentz transformations allowed the preservation of the form of Maxwell's equations in any inertial frame of reference while still supporting the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment, which showed that the "medium" of light propagation (the aether) was not dragged along by the earth. The Lorentz transformations, developed as a means to reconcile the unexpected results of the Michelson-Morley tests, predict that lengths should contract and clocks should slow down for a reference frame in motion. - http://renshaw.teleinc.com/papers/german1/german1.stm

Lorentz used Heaviside's version of Maxwell's Equations, which use partial time derivatives rather than total time derivatives, inadvertently implying motion of all the equations to be relative to the observer.

This makes sense given that the ether reference frame is for the electromagnetic waves being emitted by moving electric charges, and not the motion of the charges themselves, which is the motion involved in all the equations of classical electromagnetism. The current is obviously moving relative to the ground. The idea that the current could be measured from observers moving at different velocities would never have occurred to Faraday, Maxwell, Heaviside, or Lorentz.
 
Renshaw explains:

[T]he initial assumption of the existence of an aether led to more and more corrections to the theory to explain continually improved experiments. In the end, Einstein did away with the aether, and was left only with the "corrections" to Galilean theory. - http://renshaw.teleinc.com/papers/fizeau/fizeau.stm

Math has really always been about creating simplifying models of the world. Models that can be expressed as numbers, the most abstract of words, stripped down of all content so that they can be manipulated by preset rules and formulae. For better or for worse, numbers standardize our reality.

Lorentz tried to preserve the ether concept while also rationalizing the null results of the experiments. Lorentz realized that the existence of the ether could be saved if he just assigned different numbers to length and time. Thus, the Lorentz transformations were quickly adopted to preserve the ether concept.

Einstein convincingly denied the ether concept. Until Einstein, physicists assumed that a wave theory required a medium of traversal. Just as sound waves are the vibration of air molecules, so too light waves should be the vibration of some other analogous material, which was assigned the name “ether.”

But if Einstein was wrong, why was he such a phenomenon? There are three main reasons that I can see.

1. First and foremost, he was a brilliant conceptualizer, whose theoretical abilities surpassed that of Lorentz and most of his other contemporaries.
2. He did away with problem of identifying the ether, which finally allowed experimental physicists to turn their attention elsewhere.
3. As this MIT website and paper explain, he happened to come along at the right time and place in history to benefit from key social and technological currents.

Andrija Radovió writes of Special Relativity:

“We can ask ourselves how it is possible that so many things have so wrong explanations in contemporary official science. Our scholar system gives us illusion that we have explanation for all phenomena and that we can handle and control everything in the nature, but actually this is not true. lt seems that every scholar system has intention to fill any available part of the students’ mind with some data. If there are not enough facts, fictions are welcome too. We could remember the ancient Roman physician Galen who wrote 25 fat Medicines books full of... nearly nothing except instrumentations’ description. ... How did we come into the same situation? We should notice that at the time when the first modern car appeared on the streets (last decade of 19th century and first decade of 20th century) complete conceptual development of electricity was nearly finished. Polyphase currents were already invented altogether with asynchronous motors and generators that were widely used. Systems for AC electrical networks’ synchronizations, electric trains, tramways, electric cords in most apartments and houses altogether with electric lighting were existing even in small cities in Europe and America in those times. We should imagine situation where tramways, electric and steam locomotives were running together with horses running on streets. ... Then, an invasion of petrol combustion motors happened which retarded development of electrical machines and appropriate theoretical concepts including electromagnetic theory too. All blunders of electromagnetic theory were frozen waiting for some good reason to be defrosted. We are witnesses that we have not had real progress and that we have just been pushing pistons by hot gases and shaking magnets near wires for more than a century and that our almighty theories cannot predict nearly anything new.

“Einstein theory is actually an excellent compilation of theories and hypothesis of 19th century’s physics which was much better than we are willing to admit to ourselves. Einstein was a good pupil that appreciated his predecessors and he did not distrust in their science. He derived equations that are able to yield pretty accurate results although the equations are apparently based on previous and inaccurate theories. If he tried to reject these theories as false ones he would lose legality of his brand new theory and then it would never be accepted. He had to reject teaching of Faraday (l), Maxwell (II) and Lorentz (lll) to be right and this would be very bad marketing for his theory.

“We cannot blame Einstein for that. He just did one terrific job - he harmonized electromagnetic theory and classical mechanics, i.e. he harmonized theory of operation of Faraday Wheel with results of mass dilation. But, we know now that classic electromagnetic theory is not quite correct and thus it could not be done with perfect accuracy.” - http://www.andrijar.com/therel/index.html

Some know, at least.

Curt Renshaw provides comprehensive analysis of the most prevalent alleged experimental confirmations from the last 80 years at his website. For example, he convincingly explains the effect of mass-increase as an apparent increase due to "the way in which mass is determined in a particle accelerator," not an actual increase the amount of physical mass of the particles.

Indoctrination is not an isolated problem in the operation of science today. Fortunately, due to the tremendous capacity of computers to share information for free, awareness seems to be growing. As Nobel-prize winner Randy Schekman has recently pointed out, the ignorance of obvious considerations is a testament to the indoctrination prevalent in mainstream academia.

Some of mainstream theory can be preserved by simply changing the partial derivatives in Maxwell’s equations to total derivatives, as explained by Petrovic Banko.

These three seemingly independent papers (all written by authors of different nationalities) all propose that Special Relativity can be discarded if total time derivatives are used instead of partial time derivatives in Maxwell’s Equations.
http://www.angelfire.com/sc3/elmag/ - Petrovic Banko. Nikisc, Montenegro
http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/9608038.pdf - Andrew E. Chubykalo and Roman Smirnov-Rueda. Zacatecas, Mexico
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.172.7269&rep=rep1&type=pdf - Parry Moon, Domina Eberle Spencer, Arian S. Mirchandaney, Urea Y. Shama, and Philip J. Mann. NE United States
 
Renshaw takes a different approach, which appears equivalent. He defines all motion with respect to a stationary object, such as a current-carrying wire, so that different observers will not be using different values for velocity. It seems far simpler to use the total time derivatives instead, as they have they allow for velocity to be measured by observers in their own reference frame.

As far as I can tell from reading the actual paper, Maxwell was using the total derivative for Ampere’s Law, instead of the partial time derivative as it is written by the mainstream today, but other papers I have read say Maxwell was using partial derivatives. It is largely irrelevant however, as Heaviside, whose use of 1890s mathematics notation which had not yet been developed when Maxwell was writing in the 1860s, reduced the number of equations from 20 to 4 and became the standard preferred version. Heaviside replaced the total derivative with the partial derivative because at the time, it would have been nonsense to measure the change in any reference frame other than the ground, so Heaviside “simplified” the math by using partial instead of total derivatives.

On our addiction to transcendence

Wagner's addiction to transcendence, satirized by Nietzsche:

It is easier to compose bad music than good music. Yet, what if it were more profitable, too? ... Beauty has its drawbacks [Das Schöne hat seinen Haken]: we know that. Wherefore beauty then? ... Beauty is difficult... Let us slander, my friends, let us slander, however much in earnest we may otherwise be about the ideal, let us slander melody! Nothing is more dangerous than a beautiful melody! ... Never let us acknowledge that music "may be a recreation"; that it may "enliven"... Why not rather the large-scale, the sublime, that which moves masses? ... "Whoever stuns us is strong; whoever elevates us is divine; whoever makes us wonder vaguely is profound."— Let us make up our mind then, my friends in music: we do want to stun them, we do want to elevate them, we do want to make them wonder vaguely. That much we are capable of. - http://www.thenietzschechannel.com/works-pub/cw/cwpt6-dual.htm

Our society needs to get over the desire to be dazzled--Nietzsche understood this clearly 130 years ago. For Nietzsche, beauty is NOT primarily transcendent. Beauty is the difficult marriage of the transcendent with the immanent.

Unfortunately, our society has not heeded his advice. We have only accelerated our addiction, which, due to market competition for funding, has spread to every field. The easiest, and therefore best economic strategy, to receive funding is to dazzle the customer/donor/viewer.

The need for transcendence--the need to dazzle our intuition--is understandable as emotionally it is extremely addicting. Jung even fell for it in his theory of synchronicity. Jung says to use rational judgment to survive, and save intuition for our "opus magnum" of individuation, aka writing our personal mythology.

The problem with this is that the search for synchronicities/dazzlement/etc is necessarily a competitive one. The solution is to bring the rational judgment and artisitic intuition together. Marry the opposites. Divorce ourselves from the "prince" within us who demands to be dazzled, and focus that energy on cultural relationships, which are potentially more rewarding than ego pursuits, anyway.

pt. 2 here

More reflections on Miles Mathis

The internet is so amazing! I discovered Miles Mathis’ website May 4th, 2013 (when searching “variable acceleration” Newton Leibniz on Google). Now, just over four months later, I’m still hooked. I actually feel like I’m in one of those detective movies, where it’s up to me to unravel the mystery. I say this not because I’m crazy (I hope), but because, while researching questions (again using Google) I keep stumbling upon other academic papers and blogs making the same claims as Miles, often in unique, highly differentiated ways.

Here is a short list of the best ones:

• http://densytics.com - very nice blog that rivals some of Miles’ papers in deconstructing of mainstream physics.
• http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/science-technology-and-society/sts-003-the-rise-of-modern-science-fall-2010/assignments/assn4a/ - really interesting assignment and student response from an MIT course, which points out the inaccuracies in Arthur Eddington’s famous measurements that were take as proof of Einstein’s theory of curved space. Note that Nikola Tesla rejected curved space to his death in 1943.
• http://www.gsjournal.net/old/science/ricker9.pdf - an excellent summary of magnetic theory in the 17th and 18th centuries and how it relates to Newton’s gravitational theory.
• http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0505/0505194.pdf - interesting alternate theory of gravity. I still need to compare / contrast this with Miles’, however.

I'm still fascinated with Miles' overall project, which, following the the intuition of Tesla, creates an alternative to Einstein's idea of curved space-time.

One of my takeaways from the August conference is that the whole issue actually goes back to Newton, and the idea of "action at a distance." Before Newton, the scientific concept of "force" meant to move an object out of its natural state. Newton, however, needed a word to explain his concept of celerity (which we now call "acceleration" but that concept hadn't been mathematically defined yet when Newton was writing).

Before Newton, a force was a collision from outside. Force was seen "forcing" an object out of its natural state. Newton's concept of gravity as a naturally occurring state flips the old idea around by claiming that certain forces are an ever-present relationship between objects, even when separated by the vacuum of space. Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Huygens both criticized Newton's theory on this point at the time, but Newton's mathematics accurately predicted astrological and terrestrial measurements, so gained wider credibility in time.

However, the cause of gravity remains a mystery to this day, as there is still no evidence whatsoever for the existence of gravitons. Without an identified mechanical cause, gravity remains to this day, a non-physical theory.

The mystery of gravity's source runs parallel to the scienfitic understanding of magnets. A few days after attending the conference, I was struck by how little I had learned about magnetism, as a physics major or through internet research. Newton was very much aware of the obvious similarities between his theory of gravitational attraction and magnetic attraction, but was reluctant to make the comparison in his published writings. As the link on magnetism above observes,

Newton’s ambiguous views on magnetism have been the source of debate and confusion among historians of science. This is most easily cleared up by the hypothesis that Newton simply does not know the true nature of magnetism, but he is hopeful that, in the future, it can be integrated into his system of natural philosophy. This approach has left Newtonian scholars in a state of confusion regarding magnetism. They have sought to answer the question: What di d Newton believe was the cause of magnetism? Did he believe in a mechanical or a non-mechanical cause? Newton’s published writings indicate he thought that it was a non-mechanical force of attraction acting at a distance like gravity, but his unpublished writings and private comments indicate he believed in a mechanical theory of Cartesian vortices.

And later,

Magnetic science at the end of the eighteenth century has rejected field theory in favor of action-at-a distance. This is not a progressive development. The nascent field theories of the Greeks, and the scholastic philosophers which finds tentative expression in Gilbert is nonexistent by the end of the century. Two hundred years after Gilbert’s ground breaking work, magnetic theory has progressed very little.

The progress in technical achievement is certainly impressive. The development of artificial magnets and the increased knowledge of terrestrial magnetism are certainly impressive, but they pale in comparison with the fact that the understanding of magnetism as a force of nature has improved very little. The standard account of science history confuses technology and engineering with science. The progress in knowledge obtained by the Newtonian method is purely the knowledge of the engineer, the artificer, and the mathematician. Progress in natural philosophy had been neglected and languished during the eighteenth century. The Newtonians seemed to believe, once the law of magnetic force was established to be the same as gravity, then its application would solve all problems in magnetic science, just as easily as the law of gravity transformed celestial mechanics and knowledge of the solar system. This dream was never fulfilled for the electric and magnetic sciences. The steady progress towards understanding under the aegis of Newtonian method was not what happened as the eighteenth century faded into the nineteenth. - http://www.gsjournal.net/old/science/ricker9.pdf

So where does that leave theoretical science today? It leaves us in a state of further and further specialization, where each field requires its own branch of mathematics to "make the numbers work", leaving us farther and farther from Einstein's old hope for a unified system.

Two Big Take-aways from My Trip to New Mexico

1.
The reason why I learned nothing about magnetism in my many years of school, is that magnetism is still quite mysterious and fascinating, and mainstream scientists generally don't like to admit that they don't fully understand such a common, everyday thing! My current educational project, which should actually be fairly simple to pull off, is to design a math curriculum that incorporates magnets. 

2.
Compulsory education, which started right when industrialization was taking off, totally changed the way the rest of society perceives science. Before industrialization, people did not need to be trained for factory-style work, and so could learn freely at their own pace. Theoretical science was perceived as being exactly as relevant as our society sees philosophy today. After industrialization, factory owners needed a cheap program that grades and sorts people on their ability to follow complex instructions. The laws of science and mathematics provided precisely such a program!

Science became the cornerstone of the compulsory school curriculum, and therefore holds its current place in the media as the "economic driver." However, the attitude that theoretical science is an economic driver is a cover used to justify the need for our current competitive, compulsory schooling system that allows large corporations cherry pick the brightest students for management positions. Experimentation and tinkering are what leads to new inventions and technology, but theoretical science, which is 99% of the science that is taught in schools and universities today, really is only peripheral to the invention of new technology and economic growth.

What Is a Curve?

This post is simply an abridged version of Miles Mathis's essay http://milesmathis.com/pi.html

I see this essay as the theoretical foundation of Mathis's system, so it is a good place to start in order to avoid confusion when reading Mathis's other essays.

par. 10

Drawing a circle is a real event, not an abstract event. In fact, any possible circle must take time into consideration. This is true of orbits, bugs walking in circles, whirlwinds, and so on. When we apply mathematics to any of these situations, we must take time into account. That is why we find accelerations in all circular motion, the most famous of which is the centripetal acceleration. Centripetal acceleration can be due to gravity or to some other force, but in any circular motion there will always be a centripetal acceleration.

par. 14

Here is an equation that is used everyday, right now, by the smartest people alive:

v = C/t = 2πr/t

     where v is the orbital velocity, C is the circumference and t is the period of the orbit. Newton used this equation. ... We have C in the place of x, as if C is a simple distance. [However,] C is not a simple distance. There is no way to express C with just an x-dimension. In fact, as I have just shown, C is three-dimensional, if you include time. This equation is including time, as you can see by the denominator. You cannot have a t in the denominator and claim you are ignoring time. You cannot put a curve over a time and have it come out to be a simple velocity. Velocity is defined as x/ t. The variable x is one-dimensional and therefore cannot curve.

par. 18

[S]ay you are in a tiny spaceship at the center of the circle. You are instructed to fly at a thousand miles per hour for one hour, then turn left at a 90o angle and keep going, not pausing or changing your velocity. You will say, “I need some method for calculating velocity. What if the background changes in some weird way after I make the left turn?” I answer, “Just measure internally. Meaning, use your onboard clock and check your engine’s rpm. Whatever the rpm’s were as you were going a thousand miles per hour along the first straight line, keep them there after you turn left.” You do as I say and after exactly one hour you come to a rosebush and a sign that says, “left here.” Miraculously you make the sharp turn without slowing down at all. After some time you come to the rosebush again and you think, “Is that the same rosebush? What is going on?” What is going on is that I turned on a big magnet as soon as you got to the rosebush. My magnet and I, sitting at the center of the circle [with r = 1000 miles], are causing you to circle us.

      According to this set-up, your velocity out to the rosebush would be r/t. You were instructed to keep this velocity, by a method that would guarantee it was kept. Therefore your tangential velocity is also r/t.

par. 20

Now, the question is, what centripetal acceleration must I apply to you with my magnet to keep you moving in a circle? Surprisingly, the answer is always the same. It doesn’t matter what your speed is going out to the rosebush or how long it takes you to get there or how far away the rosebush is. As long as you keep your speed the same before and after you turn, the acceleration I must apply to you with my magnet is. . . . π.

par. 29

Pi only applies if the tangential velocity is equal to r/t. But in orbits and most physical problems, this will not be true. The centripetal acceleration and the tangential velocity are independent motions. They are not necessarily related, much less equal. That is why we don’t find the value of pi for the acceleration in gravitational fields.

par. 33

To be even more specific, a = v2/r works in experiment because v = 2πr/t works in experiment. The equation v = 2πr/t is a very useful number to us even though it does not really express the orbital velocity, or any velocity. It is more useful to us than the actual orbital velocity or the actual tangential velocity, both of which aren't really that interesting in experiment except as theoretical numbers. The number 2πr/t is a number we can use, and if we mislabel it as a velocity, well, who cares as long as we mislabel it the same way throughout the centuries?

    Engineers aren't paid or trained to care about such things, but theoretical scientists understand that such mistakes ultimately lead to ruin. In the short term they may lead to simple engineering failures, which is bad enough. But in the long term they always lead to theoretical dead-ends, since a sloppy equation is the surest of all possible ways to stop scientific progress. A correct equation is almost infinitely expandable, since its impedance is zero. Future scientists can develop it in all possible directions. But a false or imprecise equation can halt this development indefinitely, as we have ample proof. Mislabelling variables is not a semantic or metaphysical failure. Is it failure of science itself.