The uproar escalated when a scientific adviser to Egypt‘s interim President Adly Mansour denounced the claim and said it has no scientific base. „What has been said and published by the armed forces harms the image of the scientists and science in Egypt,“ Essam Heggy, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology, told the daily newspaper El-Watan in remarks published on Wednesday. „All scientists inside and outside Egypt are in a state of shock.“