Endless Frontiers
How science can discover a pattern and still fail to carry it forward.
Read the essayA living map for science
Version control for scientific state.
Git tells you what changed. Vela tells you what still stands, what remains open, and where the next bounded contribution belongs.
Vela 0.977.2
MapAdvanceRemap
Scientific work is abundant. Shared state is not.
Activity becomes inheritable only when consequence is retained as state.
Code, papers, datasets, proofs, notebooks, and agent runs already have capable homes. What they do not share is a durable account of which claims stand, what evidence supports them, what changed, and what downstream work should be reconsidered.
Vela adds that account without replacing the tools that produced the work. It preserves the boundary between activity, evidence, verification, human decision, and current scientific state.
Work is not evidence. Evidence is not a Decision. A Decision is not the history it changes.
Work becomes state through explicit gates.
Producing an artifact, checking it, and accepting its scientific consequence are different acts with different owners. Vela keeps the handoffs visible.
- mapreads Problems, Claims, Standing, dependencies, Corrections, and gaps
- advancemeans native work that may produce a bounded proposed change
- remapreplays Standing and derives affected, blocked, and open state
Named Repository authority is the gate.A check does not accept its consequence. Only named Repository authority can change Standing. Replay then derives the successor state without erasing the path that led there.
Science keeps the tools it already trusts.
Vela is a narrow state layer between existing environments. It does not absorb the laboratory, the notebook, the proof assistant, the repository, or the agent runtime.
Repositories
Canonical custody
Git retains the exact records, history, policy, and signatures that define scientific state.
Research tools
Native work
Proof assistants, notebooks, datasets, instruments, and pipelines continue to produce evidence in their own environments.
Humans and agents
Bounded contribution
People and agents may produce and submit work. Neither receives scientific authority merely by producing it.
Public readers
Contestable inspection
The web projection makes current state legible while the exact record and local replay remain available underneath it.
When science changes
Correction keeps lineage instead of erasing it.
A later result can change what a field should inherit without pretending the prior state never existed. Replay derives the successor and preserves the route taken to reach it.
Protocol example, not a live scientific event
Prior state
A Claim has Standing at an exact Repository root.
New evidence
A bounded Submission preserves the correction and the artifacts that support it.
Scoped check
A Verification Record states what was checked. It does not accept the consequence.
Human decision
Named Repository authority accepts, rejects, or withholds the proposed change.
Successor state
Replay derives what stands now and retains the path from the prior root.
Begin with the argument for a public scientific record.
Read the projection. Replay the source.
The scientific view and canonical Math history are public. Clone the Repository and replay the revision you have checked out. To reproduce the published projection exactly, use its technical manifest to select the same Math commit first.
Install and replay the checked-out revision
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vela-science/vela/v0.977.2/install.sh | \ VELA_VERSION=v0.977.2 bash git clone https://github.com/vela-science/math.git cd math vela replay . --json vela status . --json