Philosopher Daniel Dennett had a term for this: the idea of a “universal acid,” a hypothetical substance that can eat through any container, will burrow and burrow to the core of the world. Dennett used universal acid as a metaphor for Darwinism, but, in the maximally pessimistic take, he may as well have been talking about all of science: a universal acid that threatens to strip away meaning. Even if we don’t go that far, what’s definitely true is that science is a universal de-coloring agent. It is achromatizing. For Neptune’s loss of color has played out again and again as science has advanced and the natural world has been stripped of its subjective paint. This aspect of science is by design; it removes subjectivity on purpose, a strategy that goes back to science’s origins.