Why Read: On June 1, a small group of scientists and mathematicians will release what they are calling the first tranche of a new treatment of Resonance Theory: five new papers released simultaneously, with new mathematics, new semantics, and specific numeric proof cases. This new effort (RT2) is based on over 45 years of prior study and publication (RT1), all of which will be unified on RT2 Release Day, the first day of the FiRe 2026 conference (details below).

If you are attending FiRe this year, you will, in the first hour of the first day, be exposed to first-light images of the cosmos from the DiRAC Institute's analytics of the world's biggest telescope camera, at the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile - and see, for the first time, a night sky that is not dark, but rather is fully occupied by brilliant events: an amazing new world, in keeping with FiRe's theme for 2026, "Reimagining Innovation in the Next World."

And, in the ensuing half-hour, via a David Brin interview of the RT Working Group, you'll hear updated answers to the age-old questions: What is this new world made of? How does it work?

In this week's issue, we'll provide a human side to this exciting journey of discovery.

Breaking the Law

Note: Numbers in parentheses refer not to citations, which are in the papers themselves, but to numbered major discoveries mentioned in this issue.

Some people will understand this emotion immediately; others may not. I myself didn't get it right away, but it continued to build over a period of months and years, from intellectual unease into what can only, even today, be called outright anger. The accepted theory of light required cheating on the most important law in physics.

Physics - the purest form of understanding how the world works - had always been a passion for me, so it makes sense that I would sign on for the 101 course as soon as I got into Stanford. Not long after, I found myself listening to an explanation of what's known as the "two-slit experiment" (1) - a mystery to all, at the time, about whether light was a wave or a particle. But I was looking at the problem differently. At question time during one class, I askedhow either of the current alternatives could avoid violating the most important law of all: conservation of energy. This law is both simple and universal, based on every pattern of physics: energy can be neither created nor destroyed.

Here was the problem: at that time, physicists believed that empty space was indeed empty, other than a kind of cheat that allowed a made-up quantum foam to exist but never be tested. (Even today, physics is riddled with cheats, with ideas that cannot be tested and fake numbers used to get real answers.) But if space were really empty, neither the wave model nor the particle model could be right, since both experienced what looked like moving from zero to maximum energy along their flight paths.

My professor didn't appreciate the question and pretended the answer wasobvious. It wasn't obvious; he was just wrong and wouldn't admit it. After all, this "dogma" of the standard model had been around for 100 years or more. Who was a dumb freshman student to question it?

The real answer was obvious to me: space definitely was not empty. (2)Today, we members of the Resonance Working Group have a category of obvious things we call "T-shirt slogans." This one boils down to: You cannot have a wave without a medium. (3)

Later, I learned a deeper answer that accompanies this - another T-shirt:Everything is made of waves. (4)

But back then, I had little extra time, and I didn't come back to these questions until, after having completed creating the world's first research-based whale museum, I suddenly had lots of time on my hands.