It is frequently envisioned that scientific discoveries happen serendipitously - the way one might, while walking in a forest, chance upon a mushroom. Although this may be true about some discoveries, it is certainly never true about those which are complex or paradigm-shifting. Such discoveries involve, on the one hand, an analytical event of seeing the difference in a phenomenon that is either unknown and has to be brought about by an effort of the discoverer, or has often been in plain view before, but has been amalgamated to something else; and, on the other hand, the design of experiments capable of 'giving consistency' to the original observation, as a series of ramifications that map out a new territory and permit a new conceptualization of the found difference and its 'paradigmatic connections'.

A paradigm change involves a substantial alteration in the framework of scientific thought. To bring it about or make a new 'cut', the act of discovery must identify an actual and unsurmised difference in nature. It must dissociate the phenomenon from what amalgamates it and prevents its recognition, by separating the qualitatively distinct components of its function from the 'impure mix' - as Henri Bergson called it - that presents them. Scientists whose work has led them to a paradigm-shifting difference are often led by their journey of discovery, unsuspecting of what awaits them. All they have to rely upon is their method - a composite of intuition, a tight experimental program, the sharpening of analytical tools and the creation of new methodologies.

The trajectory of Paulo and Alexandra Correa's scientific discoveries, related in their Experimental Aetherometry, is a trajectory of making differences, dissociating some of the many 'impure mixes' - with which existing science obstructs its own capacity to understand nature - into their fundamental components. The experimental phenomena which are the object of study are simple and, for the most part, so familiar to students of physics as to appear almost pedestrian: the charge and discharge patterns of electroscopes under different environmental conditions; the thermal behaviors of certain types of metal boxes, with or without insulation, with respect to the surrounding atmosphere; the effects of Tesla coils on metal surfaces, electroscopes, receivers and radiation detectors; the effects of blackbody photons and electrically-charged gravitational pendulums on charged surfaces, and so on.

However, where the difference characteristic of the approach of the Correas to these basic phenomena lies, is in the more exacting perception, observation and isolation of new and unsuspected - and often anomalous - aspects or features of these phenomena, which they then assemble into a new physics framework. The new methodologies they forge permit them to precisely isolate, in these phenomena which existing physics has not bothered to examine in detail, energy effects which, although they have been swept under the rubric of either "electric" or "electromagnetic", in fact cannot be explained by the action of these, or any other known, energy forms. Through a rigorous study of these effects, the Correas discover that at play are two separate kinds of energy - both massfree, i.e. devoid of inertia - whose existence or nature is unknown to present-day physics. One is the little-understood energy whose manifestation in water vapour is referred to by chemists and meteorologists as "latent heat", and which is responsible for molecular phase states and van der Waals bonds. The other is an ambipolar (as opposed to monopolar) form of electricity that propagates longitudinally. The Correas succeed in identifying "latent heat" as the energy which supports the antigravitational work of electrons trapped in a saturated conduction band, and whose presence in the local atmosphere permits a charged electroscope, in the absence of significant quantities of ions, to maintain its deflection; and also, as the energy whose conversion into heat inside certain types of metal boxes is responsible for the thermal anomaly first described by Wilhelm Reich in the 1940s. Ambipolar electricity, on the other hand, is identified as the energy which is radiated from Tesla coils and which has been mistakenly assumed to be their "AC electromagnetic field", and is shown to be the same radiation that is emitted by stars. In fact, the Correas propose a precise ambipolar energy spectrum for solar radiation and for the energy underlying the cosmic microwave spectrum.

But the research of the Correas demonstrates that the role of these energies in nature is still deeper and more pervasive. Their action underlies the terrestrial atmospheric metabolism of oxygen, ozone and water, and the understanding of this fact permits the Correas to provide, for the first time in the history of science, a complete, thermally balanced analysis of this allotropic cycle. The Correas also convincingly argue that these two forms of massfree energy are responsible for the production of the microwave Cosmic Background Radiation, as a byproduct of the cosmological creation of leptons, and they predict the existence of another, hadron-based, radio Cosmic Background Radiation; in addition, they provide strong evidence that these two forms of massfree energy are crucially at play in the structuring of mass energy and the coupling of the latter to gravitational energy.

These extraordinary advances in our understanding of nature, with which existing science has yet to come to terms, would not have been possible without many years of wrestling with, and overcoming, the conceptual insufficiencies of the current scientific paradigms regarding energy and its relationship to matter and force. In present-day physics as it has developed, the primary and most fundamental concept has been that of matter, or mass. The study of the conditions under which matter is put in motion gave rise, in the 18th century, to the original mechanical concepts of force and work. The concept of "energy" was only formally introduced into physics in the 19th century, pursuant to the great scientific and technological interest in the conversion of steam and electricity into mechanical work. Energy was accordingly conceived as "stored" mechanical work, or the capacity for doing work - i.e. for putting matter in motion. The underlying concept had not been completely absent from previous physics, but had been expressed by an inaccurate and confusing duplication of the word "force" ( it is interesting to note, for example, that the original formulations, by Grove and by von Helmholtz - in the 1840s - of the principle now known as the "conservation of energy", both referred to it as the principle of correlation, or conservation, of forces). With the discovery of the quantum in the early 20th century, and the identification of the electromagnetic spectrum of all photons (ionizing and blackbody) - which included the radiative manifestations of heat, visible and black light, X- and Gamma-rays - the concept of "energy" was enlarged to encompass "radiative energy", and the equivalence of mass-energy to electromagnetic energy was postulated as the equivalence of mass with energy. Until the present day, however, "energy" as a concept has remained an opportunistic patchwork attempting to gather under one umbrella disparate phenomena known to be in a largely mysterious relationship of interconversion. There is, in existing physics, no unified functional treatment of energy, no unraveling of its common principle and of the fine structural differences between its different forms or manifestations, no framework for a functional understanding of its interconversions.

The particular historical path along which the scientific notion of "energy" developed has imprinted the concept with many inconsistencies and lacunae. For example, holding out one's arm horizontally for a prolonged period of time certainly feels like doing work and like expending energy; but according to the mechanical definition of work as the product of mass, acceleration and distance, for as long as the arm is held immobile, no work is being performed. If one insists, however, physics may grudgingly admit that, since the effort of holding up the arm produces heat, there is indeed both work and energy involved; it would refer to these as "biological work" and "biological energy", as if to indicate that such things were outside of its proper sphere of interest. But imagine now that what was holding out its arm horizontally was a statue. It would seem that if the action of holding out an arm - i.e. of counteracting the force of gravity - involved work and energy in the case of a person, it would similarly have to involve work in the case of a statue. But this, existing physics would just flatly deny. And even though in some cases, such as that of a table holding up an object, physics might admit that there is indeed a force involved in counteracting gravity, this force is not thought to be performing any work or to be "backed", so to speak, by any energy. The universe, seen from the perspective of existing physics, abounds with such dis-energized forces - in fact, gravity itself is one of them. It is as if physics, in spite of the fact that by equating mass with energy it has injected the concept of energy, as it were, back into science's very foundations, has in fact remained, in large part, a physics of mechanistic force, and unable to complete its understanding of the energetics of the universe.

Thus, when the Correas ask, early in their investigation, whether the electrostatic energy of the charge deposited on the leaves of an electroscope is sufficient to sustain a certain deflection of the electroscope - against the force of gravity - for a certain period of time, this is a question which cannot even be meaningfully posed within the framework of present-day physics. Within this framework, once the electroscope has been deflected due to the initial imparting of charge, its ability to remain deflected - in spite of the constant assault of gravity upon the leaves - is not regarded as something that calls for an explanation. This is so even though careful observation readily shows that - once the action of ions and ionizing radiation is excluded - the duration of leaf deflection depends upon non-electric environmental factors. One gets the impression, when contemplating such examples, that the official book of basic science has been, by some unspoken dogma, closed; that basic science has been demoted from its position of a fit occupation for serious adults, and the project of a Physics of Energy abandoned midway for reasons of intellectual impotence and apathy.

By contrast, the 'basic science project' of a Physics of Energy is very much alive, and thriving, in the research of the Correas. "Experimental Aetherometry" unfolds before its reader a scientific perspective which takes energy as its most primary concept, which regards every presence of a force as a manifestation of some form of energy, and in which Space and Time themselves are exact functions of energy. The Correas succeed in systematically laying out the microfunctional structure common to all energy forms, as well as the specific microfunctions composing each distinct form of energy. A physico-mathematical foundation is thus created for an in-depth understanding of the processes of interconversion which form the basis of the Law of Conservation of Energy.

Fundamental to the Correas' scientific approach is the view that nature composes with only two basic functions: wavelength and frequency. All other measures conceptualized by physics (or, more precisely, those measures that have a reality, i.e. a basis in nature) - for example, mass, charge, voltage, capacitance, resistance, temperature, magnetic flux density - are, functionally speaking, compositions of lengths and frequencies, i.e. units of Space and Time. Aetherometry shows mass to be functionally equivalent to length, force to a superposition of waves, charge to linear momentum, voltage to speed. This pursuit of the correct natural qualities for the parameters used for the quantitative exploration and description of nature is characteristic of the all-pervading microfunctionalism underlying the aetherometric science.

Microfunctionalist thought evolved from the manifold discovery that the discrete functions of nature differ by distinct and precise fine energy structures. Microfunctionalism suggests that, if our scientific apparatus - at once analytical and conceptual - is properly prepared, tuned and tooled, it is capable of giving an exact account of these fine structures of nature. Science itself extends the fine-ness of our perception, transforming technical machines into extensions of our organs - and is thus 'forced' or 'induced' to strive to create concepts and analytical methods which are adequate to the functions of nature as we, under those conditions of more sensitive tuning, perceive them. These operational principles of microfunctionalism, in spite of their deceptive simplicity and plausibility, are deeply at variance with the epistemological trajectory of modern science, which elevates to the status of greatest achievements such proposals as the uncertainty principle, the concept of Time as indistinguishable from Space, or the notion that gravitation is a property of geometry. "Experimental Aetherometry" shows that there can be a physics which does justice to our perception of Space and Time as qualitatively different manifolds, a physics which exactly describes the structure of the electron and the proton, does not impute to nature probabilistic thinking, and pursues an energetic understanding of gravity and all manifestations of physical force.

These writings are like doors thrust open onto fresh Spring air. Paulo and Alexandra Correa have, as scientists and thinkers, an exquisite capacity for detecting the critical differences at work in basic physical phenomena, as well as for creating concepts, and analytical and experimental methods, which shape themselves precisely to the contours of their object, and which are capable of isolating the differences and connections of nature with a faithfulness from which we have long become dishabituated in science. Those who spend time with "Experimental Aetherometry", will find in it a science which springs directly from lived experience, and a functionalist mathematics which, released from the stranglehold of Platonism and logicism, strives to capture the language of nature. They will find in it a powerful incentive for striving - in one's life, science, philosophy, and art - for the adequacy of perception, thought, and language. But these writings are also a concrete demonstration of the existence and functioning of energies which are in plentiful supply all around us and which can, as the Correas have shown with distinct prototype technologies, be usefully harnessed so as to supply us with affordable, clean, inexhaustible alternatives to our present fuels. The books, therefore, need to be studied not only by those with a passion for understanding nature, but also by anyone committed to the preservation of ecological environments.