The Big Bang as a Point Explosion

Popular accounts of cosmology often describe the Big Bang as a singular explosion from a tiny point, sending matter outward into empty space. The image is vivid: fireball, blast wave, a cosmic bomb igniting the universe. It is easy to imagine and emotionally gripping.

But the metaphor carries a hidden assumption: a pre-existing container and a central point from which everything radiates. Relationally, the universe does not explode from a point. Every point participates in the unfolding; there is no centre, no outside to expand into. The Big Bang is not an event in space, but a reconfiguration of relational potential across all of space simultaneously.

To picture a central explosion is to revert to Newtonian thinking: space as stage, matter as actors, and time as a uniform clock. In truth, expansion is relational. Distances increase because the relations between regions change, not because they are propelled outward by some primordial blast.

The Big Bang did not explode; it unfolded — a global shift in relational potential, without centre or container.

Dark Energy as a Force

Cosmologists often describe dark energy as a mysterious force pushing galaxies apart, accelerating the expansion of the universe. Textbooks and popular accounts depict it as a ghostly hand, invisible yet omnipresent, acting on matter across cosmic distances. The metaphor is vivid, almost cinematic: dark energy is the universe’s secret engine, tugging at the stars.

Yet this framing is deeply misleading. It treats dark energy as a thing exerting pressure in space, as if the cosmos were a stage and the energy a player on it. Relationally, there is no external agent “pushing” galaxies. Expansion is not driven by a substance; it is a re-scaling of relational metrics, a shift in the pattern of distances and potentialities that define cosmic structure.

Calling it a force suggests agency and substance, obscuring the relational dynamics at play. Dark energy is not something separate from the universe, acting upon it; it is a feature of the evolving relationships between phenomena, not a hidden hand manipulating objects.

Metaphors of pushing and pulling seduce us into a Newtonian worldview where space is a container and matter are objects floating within it. In truth, the universe does not accelerate because it is being acted upon; it accelerates because the relational fabric itself changes.

Dark energy does not push; it manifests — the unfolding of relations, not the motion of a secret agent.

Black Hole Information Loss

Black holes are often framed as cosmic cul-de-sacs, places where matter and energy vanish, and with them, the information they carry. Popular science stories speak of a “paradox”: if a black hole evaporates via Hawking radiation, does the information about everything it swallowed disappear forever? It is a compelling image: the universe swallowing secrets into a pit from which nothing can escape.

Yet this metaphor misleads. It assumes information is a thing — a substance that can be trapped or lost. It also treats spacetime as a container in which events happen, with an outside observer measuring what enters and leaves. Relationally, there is no outside vantage; the universe has no external ledger against which information is counted. Information is not a static object, but a measure of relational potential, a way in which possibilities can be actualised or constrained.

What is called “loss” is not destruction but transformation. As matter and energy interact near a black hole, relational patterns reconfigure. Hawking radiation does not erase the universe’s relational potential; it shifts it. Information is never outside the network, never lost, because it was never a discrete thing to be confined.

The story of disappearing information relies on a substance metaphor and an external frame. Stripped of these illusions, black holes are not mysterious prisons of secrets, but regions of intense relational reconfiguration.

Information is not swallowed; it is reframed — a transformation of relations, not a vanishing act.

The Big Crunch

Popular cosmology sometimes suggests a dramatic “Big Crunch”: the universe, after expanding, will reverse course, collapse in on itself, and end in a singularity. Textbooks and popular media describe it as a cosmic implosion, a mirror image of the Big Bang, as if the universe were a tide rising and then retreating into some absolute sink. The image is cinematic, easy to visualise, and emotionally compelling.

Yet the Big Crunch metaphor is misleading. It assumes the universe is an object capable of turning around in space, a container whose boundaries can move inward. It imagines expansion and contraction as literal motions in a pre-existing arena. Relationally, there is no “space” into which the cosmos expands or contracts; there is only the network of relations between phenomena, unfolding in concert.

Collapse, in this sense, is not a literal event. It is a reconfiguration of relational potential, a shift in the patterns that define how distances, durations, and interactions are measured. What appears as contraction is merely a different relational metric emerging from the system itself.

The Big Crunch is a story of drama, but not of ontology. The universe does not reverse like a film reel. It reshapes its relational fabric, but it never “falls” into anything outside itself. The metaphor of implosion seduces with imagery but blinds us to the relational nature of cosmic change.

The universe does not crunch; it realigns — a web of relations, never a thing collapsing.

The Heat Death of the Universe

Popular accounts of cosmology often warn that the universe is hurtling toward an inevitable “heat death.” Entropy rises, energy spreads thin, stars burn out, and in the far, far future, all will be cold, dark, and lifeless. It is a haunting image: the cosmos as a dying fire, fading to nothing. One can almost feel the stillness creeping across the galaxies.

Yet the metaphor of heat death carries a subtle, and ultimately misleading, ontological assumption. It treats the universe as a container of energy, a vessel in which resources can run out. Entropy is spoken of as a depletion, as if the cosmos were a tank being drained, a reservoir approaching zero. This frames time linearly and matter as a set of consumables, and it projects the language of thermodynamics into an ontology it cannot fully sustain.

Relationally, entropy is not a law of decay in some absolute container. It is a measure of relational potential — of the ways matter, energy, and events can be organised. What we call “heat death” is not a final cessation imposed from outside, but a phase in which certain relational patterns are no longer available. It is a change in the landscape of possibility, not an extinction writ across the universe.

The problem is that metaphors of “death” and “running out” mislead us into thinking the universe is a thing that can die. In relational terms, the universe does not die, because it is not a static object with finite stores. It is a dynamic network of relations whose potential reconfigures continually. What physics measures as entropy does not herald doom; it maps the shifting constraints of what can be actualised.

The universe will not die. It will continue to unfold as relation, not as a reservoir emptied, and the heat death metaphor collapses under the weight of its own literalism.

The Universe Expanding into Nothing

The most enduring image of modern cosmology is that of the expanding balloon. Dots drawn on its surface drift apart as the balloon swells. This is meant to suggest that galaxies recede from one another, not because they are moving through space, but because space itself is stretching. At first glance, it seems an elegant metaphor: intuitive, even charming. But beneath its appeal lies a trap.

The metaphor smuggles in a background that is not there. The balloon expands into something: the surrounding air, the room that contains it. Even when physicists insist this is not what they mean—that the universe expands into nothing—the metaphor already betrays them. The very act of picturing expansion requires a container. The background seeps in unbidden.

This is not a minor problem. It reintroduces, by sleight of hand, the very ontology relational thinking rejects: space as a pre-existing stage, empty and waiting to be filled. The universe, in this picture, is an object floating in a void. But if we follow relational ontology, no such backdrop exists. Space is not a receptacle. It is not there to be stretched or occupied. It is nothing over and above the relations themselves.

Expansion, then, is not a swelling into the void. It is a re-scaling of relations internal to the system. The “distance” between galaxies increases because the metric of their relation shifts. There is no outside, no beyond, no invisible container. The metaphor misleads precisely because it tempts us to imagine one.

The problem with “expanding into nothing” is not just conceptual sloppiness; it is metaphysical regression. It drags us back to a Newtonian stage-play where the set exists before the actors arrive. Better to see expansion for what it is: a transformation of relational possibility, not a growth into emptiness.

The balloon metaphor is enchanting—but every time we picture it, we picture the wrong thing.

Information as Substance

In the age of digital metaphors, “information” is often treated as if it were a physical stuff — a fluid that flows, a commodity that can be packaged, transported, and stored. We hear of “bits” as the new atoms, as though information were the most basic material of reality.

But this is a profound category mistake. Information is not a substance at all, but a relation. It is not something that exists “in” the world like a fluid, but something that comes into being through construal: a way of aligning systemic potential with symbolic instance.

To speak of “information flowing” between particles or across spacetime is to project the metaphor of plumbing onto the ontology of meaning. Information is not transmitted; it is construed. It does not flow; it emerges when patterns are cut from potential and recognised as meaningful.

When physicists reify information as a substance — to be “stored” in black holes or “erased” in entropy — they obscure the relational nature of meaning itself. Information does not belong to matter as a secret ingredient. It belongs to construal, to the symbolic alignment through which matter itself becomes meaningful.

The metaphor of substance blinds us to this, suggesting that the world traffics in information independently of the symbolic. But information is not what the world has. It is what we make when we construe.

Quantum Jumps

The image of the “quantum jump” is one of the most misleading metaphors in modern physics. It conjures a picture of electrons vaulting across gulfs of space, as though subatomic particles were tiny acrobats leaping between planets. This is a residue of classical thinking, which insists on imagining change as motion through space and time.

But what quantum mechanics actually models is not a leap through a background, but a change in relational possibility. When we speak of an electron “jumping” from one orbital to another, nothing is traversed. No gap is crossed. Instead, what shifts is the configuration of potential — a re-structuring of systemic possibility.

Calling this a “jump” traps us in a spatialised metaphor, as if the atom were a miniature solar system and electrons were just impatient planets. What’s at stake, however, is not movement across distance but a perspectival cut: the actualisation of one relational pattern out of many.

To cling to the image of a jump is to miss the ontology that quantum mechanics reveals: not objects vaulting through void, but systemic potentials shifting into instance.

The Multiverse as Parallel Worlds

The multiverse is often imagined as literal parallel worlds branching out. Relationally, what these theories describe is a space of potentialities, not a collection of real, separate universes. Treating them as worlds encourages substance-based intuition, making potentialities appear as concrete objects. Reality is actualised relationally here and now, not multiplied into hypothetical “places” elsewhere.

Entanglement as Instant Messaging

Entanglement is sometimes metaphorically described as “instant messaging across space.” This is misleading: nothing is sent. Relationally, entangled states co-actualise correlations across a system of potentialities. There is no signal, no transmission — only the joint actualisation of relational constraints. Thinking of it as messaging fosters classical intuitions, obscuring the relational, nonlocal nature of quantum reality.

Time as a River

Time is often spoken of as a flowing river, carrying events along. This is a metaphor, and a misleading one. Time is not a substance that moves, nor a background flow. It is a relational ordering of actualisations, emergent from the sequences of events themselves. Imagining it as a river encourages the illusion of an external medium carrying reality along, rather than reality unfolding relationally.

Virtual Particles as Real Entities

Virtual particles are sometimes described as ephemeral objects popping in and out of existence. Relationally, these are mathematical tools for tracking interactions, not actual entities. Imagining them as real reinforces substance-based thinking and distracts from the patterned relational dynamics they represent. They are bookkeeping devices, not ghosts.

The Photon as a Tiny Bullet

Photons are often depicted as little bullets shooting through space. This metaphor is deeply misleading. A photon is a pattern of potential actualisation, not a tiny solid object. Its “path” is defined relationally: how it interacts with matter, fields, and measurement devices. Thinking of photons as bullets obscures interference, superposition, and entanglement — the relational character of light itself.

Quantum Tunnelling as a “Particle Escape”

Quantum tunnelling is often described as a particle “magically escaping” a barrier. This language reinforces a mechanistic, substance-based picture. Relationally, tunnelling is an instantiation of potential across relational constraints. The “barrier” is not a wall to be escaped; it is part of the network of potentialities shaping actualisation. No magic, no violation — just the natural unfolding of relational possibilities.

Absolute Simultaneity

Texts often describe events as occurring “at the same time” across space, implying a universal clock. Relationally, simultaneity is not absolute — it is defined only within a network of interactions and reference frames. Treating it as universal encourages a Newtonian mindset that obscures relativistic insights: time is a relational ordering, not a pre-existing grid. Reality unfolds in relational sequences, not in simultaneity stamped on the cosmos.

Gravitational Curvature as a Bend in a Grid

General relativity is often illustrated as a stretched fabric with objects “bending” it. This is visually effective but ontologically misleading. Space is not a material sheet, and gravity is not a force pushing objects along slopes. Curvature is a description of relational constraints between events, not a physical deformation. To think of it as a bend reinforces Newtonian intuition and obscures the subtle relational geometry that defines the movement of matter and light.

The Speed-of-Light Barrier as a Wall

It is common to speak of the speed of light as a barrier, a wall that nothing can cross. While correct operationally, this metaphor is misleading ontologically. The speed of light is a constraint on the actualisation of relational potential across events, not a physical wall blocking entities. Framing it as a wall implies substance-like resistance, encouraging mechanistic intuitions. Reality does not “bounce” off the speed limit; it organises itself relationally within constraints, and the light-speed “limit” is a property of these relational structures.

Spacetime as a Container

Spacetime is frequently imagined as a four-dimensional container in which events are placed. This metaphor subtly imposes a Newtonian frame on relativistic phenomena. In relational terms, spacetime is not a container but a network of relations among events. Points in spacetime do not exist independently; distances, intervals, and curvature are measures of relational actualisation, not coordinates in a pre-existing stage. Thinking of spacetime as a container encourages reification of abstract structures, hiding the dynamic, relational nature of the universe itself.

Quantum Randomness as Chaos

Quantum mechanics is often described as “inherently random,” implying a universe governed by chaos at its core. This is misleading. Relationally, what appears as randomness is the actualisation of potential constrained by relational systems. Probabilities do not reflect disorder; they encode structured potentialities, patterns awaiting instantiation. Calling this randomness invites a mechanistic or mystical misreading: either pure unpredictability or unknowable chaos. In reality, quantum events are coherent relational outcomes, not dice tossed by an indifferent cosmos.

Particle-Wave Duality as a Literal Duality

Textbooks often describe quantum entities as “sometimes particles, sometimes waves,” suggesting a literal duality in nature. But this framing misleads. Electrons, photons, and other quanta are not dual objects; they are instantiations of relational potential whose behaviour depends on context and measurement. The apparent wave or particle properties are patterns in the actualisation of possibilities, not two separate substances switching identities. Treating duality as literal obscures the continuity between potential and actualisation and encourages a category mistake: assuming quantum behaviour must fit pre-existing classical metaphors.

The Vacuum as Stage

Physics texts often depict the vacuum as an inert stage upon which particles and fields act. This is a subtle but pervasive metaphor. In truth, the vacuum is alive with relational potential, a field of interactions waiting to be instantiated. Particles, fields, and forces do not act on a neutral backdrop; they co-actualise the vacuum itself. To imagine it as a stage encourages a Newtonian, substance-oriented mindset, hiding the dynamic relationality of space itself.

The Cosmic Clock

Time is often imagined as a universal clock ticking uniformly, against which all events are measured. This metaphor is deceptive. There is no external chronometer; temporal relations emerge from sequences of relational events and actualisations. The universe does not keep time; it enacts it through interaction, ordering phenomena relative to one another. Treating time as a uniform flow obscures the relational, stratal, and perspectival character of temporal experience.

Dark Matter and Dark Energy as Substances

Physicists often talk of dark matter and dark energy as mysterious “stuff” filling the cosmos. This language is misleading. What we label “dark matter” or “dark energy” is a placeholder for relational effects we cannot yet map, not necessarily a new type of particle or substance. Treating them as things encourages substance-based thinking: the universe as a container with hidden contents. Relationally, these phenomena signal patterns of potential and constraint in the cosmic system, not undetected objects floating in a Newtonian void.

Deterministic Spacetime Diagrams

Spacetime diagrams, worldlines, and trajectory plots are invaluable tools, but they carry a hidden trap: the implication that events are pre-determined paths through a static manifold. In reality, what appears as a “trajectory” is the actualisation of relational potentials — a pattern emerging from interactions, constraints, and probabilities. Depicting these as deterministic lines fosters a mechanistic illusion, concealing quantum indeterminacy, relational emergence, and the fluidity of actualisation. Reality is not drawn in lines; it unfolds in relational patterns.

Timeless Absolutes

Conservation laws are often framed as eternal, unchanging truths — energy, momentum, charge conserved across the cosmos, as if the universe itself were frozen in timeless absolutes. Yet from a relational perspective, these are descriptions of patterns in relational potential, not immutable edicts. Conservation expresses constraints within networks of interactions, contingent on context and system boundaries. To treat them as eternal absolutes encourages a substance-based metaphysics and obscures the relational nature of reality: patterns are actualised here and now, not floating timelessly independent of events.

The Cosmic Machine

From classical mechanics to popular physics, the universe is often imagined as a machine: deterministic, clockwork, and separable. This metaphor has deep consequences. It imposes linear causality, separability, and an illusory autonomy of objects — concepts at odds with quantum entanglement, nonlocality, and relational emergence. The cosmos is not a machine, but a network of interdependent actualisations. Every event unfolds in relation to potential elsewhere; reality is process, not mechanism, and our metaphors must reflect that.

The Push-Pull Illusion

Forces are often depicted as literal pushes and pulls, transmitted across space. This is a metaphor that misrepresents the relational nature of interaction. Forces are descriptions of changes in relational constraints, not literal contact or transmission of “stuff.” Gravity does not “pull,” electromagnetism does not “push.” These are shorthand for patterns of actualisation within relational systems. Treating forces as mechanical contact encourages a substance-based, mechanistic view of reality that obscures relational emergence.

The Nothingness of Space

The vacuum is often described as empty, inert, or nothing. Yet quantum fields pervade every so-called “empty” region. Space is never empty; it is a medium of relational potential. To call it nothingness encourages the illusion of a Newtonian void where objects act upon one another across emptiness. In truth, every “vacuum” is saturated with possibilities, fluctuations, and latent interactions. Reality is relationally dense, even when appearances suggest emptiness.

The Substantial Energy Myth

Energy is frequently talked about as if it were a tangible substance, a fluid flowing through systems. This is misleading. Energy is a relational measure of potential for change between states, not a thing in itself. Imagining it as a substance encourages substance-based metaphysics, where the universe is a reservoir of “stuff” rather than a field of relational possibilities. Energy is a bookkeeping device for describing constraints, transformations, and potential actualisations — not a particle, fluid, or commodity.

The Collapse Metaphor

In quantum mechanics, it is often said that the wavefunction “collapses” upon measurement. This phrasing implies a sudden ontological event: a probabilistic fog condenses into reality. But relationally, nothing “collapses.” The wavefunction encodes potentiality, and measurement is the instantiation of relational patterns. Speaking of collapse obscures the continuity between possibility and actuality and perpetuates a dualistic illusion: that the world “exists as potential” and then “switches to reality.” Reality is always relationally instantiated, not suddenly created by observation.

The Background Field

Electromagnetic and gravitational fields are often pictured as pre-existing stages on which matter moves, as if they were inert canvases. This metaphor misleads. Fields are not backgrounds; they are relational potentialities — patterns of influence instantiated only through interaction. There is no field independent of its relations. To imagine them as passive scenery is to confuse potential with substance, and to obscure the mutual co-constitution of what we call “matter” and “field.” The universe is not matter moving through empty space; it is a network of relational events in which potential is continuously actualised.

The Particle-as-Thing

Physics textbooks often depict elementary particles as tiny, enduring objects — billiard balls of the quantum world, zipping through space. But this is a metaphor, and a misleading one. What we call a “particle” is not a standalone object with inherent existence; it is an instantiation of relational potential. Its identity emerges only in interaction, in the context of a system of possibilities. Electrons are patterns of constraints and actualisations, not enduring “things” bouncing along pre-defined trajectories. Treating them as objects encourages a Newtonian mindset that obscures the relational and probabilistic nature of quantum phenomena. Reality is not a collection of things, but a field of relational enactments.

The Expansion of Space

Cosmologists tell us that space is expanding. Galaxies recede, the universe stretches, and the very fabric of spacetime swells like a cosmic balloon. The image is seductive: space as a thing that grows, carrying everything along with it.

But this is a metaphor that misleads. Space is not a substance to expand; it is a relational system of events. Galaxies do not drift apart because space stretches beneath them; they separate because the network of relations among events is reconfiguring. Expansion is not a property of space but a description of how potentials are phased and aligned across the unfolding of the universe.

To speak of “stretching space” is to smuggle in a backdrop where none exists. The relational cut shows us that what we observe is not a pre-existing medium being pulled apart, but the continuous actualisation of relations that define distance, alignment, and interaction. The universe does not expand; the relational order of events scales.

So we can state it sharply:

Space does not expand — only the relations between events do.

The Beginning of Time

Cosmology loves origins. The Big Bang is often described as “the moment time began,” a singular point from which everything else unfolds. It is a convenient image: time has a birth, a zero, a starting line. But the metaphor is deeply misleading.

Time does not begin as a thing; it does not spring into existence like a river suddenly appearing from a mountain spring. What begins is a cut — a differentiation of potential into actual events. To speak of the beginning of time as if it were a coordinate or a pre-existing thread collapses the relational nature of temporal actuality into a static image.

Relationally, the “beginning” is a horizon of possibility brought into articulation. The past is not an inert domain waiting to be crossed; the future is not a location to arrive at. The Big Bang, understood correctly, is not the birth of time but the actualisation of a relational field of events — the first cut that instantiated a web of potential now continuously unfolding.

To reduce it to a temporal coordinate is to reintroduce a Newtonian stage under the guise of cosmology. Relational ontology refuses this illusion: there is no absolute zero of time, only the ever-renewed emergence of actuality from potential.

So the aphoristic cut is:

Time does not begin — events do.

The Arrow of Time

We love arrows. They suggest direction, purpose, inevitability. In physics and popular discourse alike, time is imagined as an arrow — moving inexorably from past to future, carrying events along its shaft. Thermodynamics, cosmology, and even philosophy have all drunk from this metaphor. But here, as elsewhere, metaphor has hardened into dogma.

The arrow suggests a vector, a pre-existing path along which events are carried. But from a relational perspective, this is precisely backward. Nothing “moves forward” through time. There is no river, no projectile, no trajectory independent of the events themselves. What appears as temporal asymmetry — the “arrow” — is the result of successive cuts: the continual actualisation of potential into event. The directionality is not intrinsic to time, but emerges from the relational ordering of occurrences.

To talk of the arrow is to overlook the generative cut of time. The arrow implies pre-existence, a thread to follow. Relationally, events do not follow; they bring their own horizon of becoming. Each actualisation phases into the next not because it is propelled along an arrow, but because relational constraints unfold consistently.

So we can put it bluntly:

There is no arrow of time — only the direction of the cut from potential to event.

The Fabric of Spacetime

Physicists love their cloth. Textbooks and documentaries spread out a chequered grid — stretched, bent, or indented by heavy spheres. “The fabric of spacetime,” we are told, is the stage on which events unfold. It is woven, elastic, and pliable, a kind of cosmic cloth.

But this metaphor is not innocent. A fabric is a backdrop: inert, extended, already there. It suggests that reality is underpinned by a passive canvas upon which matter merely leaves its marks. In this image, spacetime is something like a theatre curtain, rippling as the play unfolds, but never itself the action.

Relationally, this is exactly backward. Events are not embroidered onto a pre-given cloth. What we call “spacetime” is nothing over and above the structured potential of events themselves. The “fabric” does not exist apart from the weave of actualisation; it is nothing but the patterning of relations as they take form.

The cloth metaphor also smuggles in a false substance. It tempts us to reify spacetime into a thing that can stretch, tear, ripple. But what actually stretches or curves are not bolts of metaphysical fabric — they are the relational possibilities of alignment, cut by events. The metaphor invites us to picture spacetime as a physical medium, when in truth it is an abstraction, a system of construal that tracks how possibilities interrelate.

To persist in speaking of fabric is to cling to Newton’s absolute stage — a grid that endures even if nothing happens upon it. To cut with relational ontology is to invert the image: the “fabric” is not what underlies events but what emerges from their alignment. No cloth, no backdrop, no loom: only the ongoing weaving of relational potential into actual events.

So the aphoristic cut is this:

There is no cosmic cloth — the only fabric is the weave of events themselves.

The Curvature of Spacetime

Einstein’s equations are elegant: mass and energy tell spacetime how to curve, and curved spacetime tells matter how to move. A neat reciprocity, expressed in a geometric metaphor. But somewhere along the way, the metaphor hardened into ontology: space itself is imagined as a pliable fabric, bending and warping under the weight of planets and stars.

This is a sleight of hand. The equations describe relations of motion and potential, not the contortions of an invisible sheet. To picture spacetime as a thing that curves is to confuse description with substance — to mistake the geometry of our models for the dynamics of reality.

Relationally, the problem is stark. There is no “fabric” to be curved, no background medium awaiting deformation. What exists are the lawful correlations between events — how motions align, constrain, and open possibilities. To speak of curvature is shorthand for those relational constraints, not the bending of an ether we have already abandoned.

The metaphor comforts because it offers a picture. We can imagine a marble rolling on a trampoline, gravity made visible. But this picture misleads: it reintroduces a medium in order to explain what requires none, and disguises relational necessity as geometric surface.

The alternative is cleaner: gravity is not the sagging of a fabric, but the pattern of lawful alignment in the becoming of events.

So let us cut through the metaphor:

There is no curvature of spacetime — only the relational order of motion.

The Block Universe

The “block universe” has become the philosopher’s favourite monument to time: a frozen four-dimensional edifice, where past, present, and future all coexist as equally real, laid out like rooms in a house. We are told that what we call “the present” is nothing but the wall our consciousness is scraping against, a trick of perspective on an unchanging whole.

It sounds elegant. But it is a fiction born of metaphor, not necessity. The block picture arises from treating spacetime as if it were an object that is rather than a system that orders. It reifies geometry into ontology: drawing a diagram of worldlines, then mistaking the map for the territory.

Relationally, the mistake is clear. There is no eternal block of pre-existing events. There is potential, and there is actualisation. To imagine the future already “there” is to dissolve the very distinction that makes becoming possible. What the block universe erases is not time, but emergence itself.

Its appeal rests on the illusion of certainty: the comfort that everything is already fixed, already written. But the cost is high: it denies actuality its openness, and reduces events to coordinates on a frozen grid.

The relational alternative is sharper: time is not a static dimension, but the ever-renewed cut between potential and event. The block is an artefact of metaphor; reality is not a monument but a living articulation.

So let us put it bluntly:

There is no block — only the continual becoming of events.

The Flow of Time

Few metaphors have proven more seductive — or more misleading — than the idea that time “flows.” It is everywhere in our language: we speak of time rushing by, slipping through our fingers, carrying us forward like a current. Physics too has borrowed the trope, smuggling it into accounts of cosmology and thermodynamics. Yet “the flow of time” is a metaphor that corrodes understanding rather than clarifies it.

To imagine time flowing is to imagine it as a substance, a thing that moves. But what moves? Not events themselves: they occur. Not clocks: they measure. Not space: it does not carry us anywhere. The idea that time “flows” amounts to the conflation of temporal ordering with spatial displacement. It is to smuggle in space by the back door of metaphor, projecting movement into what is nothing but the constitutive condition of succession.

From a relational perspective, the error is stark. Time is not something that flows; it is the ordering potential of actualisation. The present is not “carried along” by a current, but constituted in the cut from potential to event. Nothing moves forward; rather, actuality keeps emerging.

The metaphor of flow is so entrenched that it hides in plain sight, as if it were neutral description. But it is not. It subtly commits us to a picture in which time is an external stream, into which events are dropped like pebbles. Relationally, this is backwards. Events are primary; ordering is emergent.

The result is simple, if blunt:

Time does not flow — events occur.

The Spatialisation of Time

General relativity is one of the great achievements of physics. By modelling the universe as a four-dimensional Lorentzian manifold, Einstein showed that gravity is not a force but the curvature of spacetime. The theory has been vindicated time and again: light bends around stars, clocks tick slower near massive bodies, GPS satellites would fail without its corrections.

But here is the problem: in this model, time is treated as if it were a dimension of space. Mathematically, the metric signature distinguishes it — minus signs remind us that time is not quite like length. Yet ontologically, the slide is made: both space and time become coordinates of events, plotted on a manifold as if they are already there.

This produces the notorious “block universe” reading: past, present, and future all equally real, a static 4D geometry in which becoming is an illusion. Time disappears into extension.

From a relational perspective, this is a mistake. Succession is not a coordinate. It is the perspectival cut between potential and actual: the way possibilities become events. Space construes coexistence — how different potentials align simultaneously. Time construes succession — how one actualisation phases into the next.

General relativity works because it models the relational constraints among already-actualised events. The manifold gives us the geometry of what has been cut from potential into actuality. What it cannot model is the openness of what is not yet. “Now” is not a coordinate on a chart; it is the reflexive alignment of construal itself.

So the critique is not that general relativity is wrong. On the contrary: it is right within its scope. The problem comes when geometry is mistaken for ontology. Physics models the realised order of events; ontology must still account for the cut of succession itself.

That cut is time — not an axis in space, but the very difference between possibility and event.

Time Out of Joint: Rereading Quantum Gravity through Relational Ontology

The latest Nature commentary on the search for quantum gravity (here) presents the familiar paradoxes with renewed metaphors. The article insists that reconciling general relativity and quantum mechanics requires a better understanding of time, yet its own conceptual scaffolding guarantees confusion. Six themes stand out:

1. The spatialisation of mathematics

The text repeatedly treats Hilbert space as if it were a location — a place where transitions “occur.” This is not a neutral description but a reification: the representational space of possible states becomes an ontological container. From a relational perspective, Hilbert space is not a “where” but a system of potential, a theory of instances. To spatialise it is to misread the system as phenomenon.

2. Synchronisation as metaphor and mystification

The analogy of a singer keeping in time with a hidden recording suggests that “time” runs in two independent flows — one in mathematics, one in physics — that must somehow remain perfectly synchronised. This is a contrived problem. The apparent synchrony is simply a perspectival alignment within the theory itself. To posit two clocks and then marvel at their coordination is to invent a paradox and then marvel at its solution.

3. Fabric and stage/actor metaphors for spacetime

Relativity is described as upgrading spacetime from stage to actor, from passive background to dynamic fabric. These metaphors import material and theatrical substance into what is a relational construal. Space-time is not woven cloth, nor an agent strutting on stage, but a structured systemic model of potential relations. The metaphors obscure this, making it appear as though the model itself were the material.

4. Absolutising representation as ontology

The claim that “nothing is external to spacetime” follows from the representation, not from reality. To insist on the absolute exclusivity of spacetime is to mistake the horizon of a model for the horizon of being. Relational ontology insists otherwise: every construal is perspectival, and no model totalises meaning.

5. Events as substance rather than cut

The article construes events as things that “happen in spacetime” — already given, already located. In relational terms, events are not substances but perspectival cuts: instances actualised against systemic potential. A “history” is not a pre-existing path but a structured construal of potential trajectories. To mistake them for realities is to confuse theory with phenomenon.

6. Probability as hidden strangeness

The sum-over-histories approach is celebrated for eliminating Copenhagen’s duality, only for its “strangeness” to be relocated, like a ruck in a carpet, into the peculiarities of probability. Yet the problem arises only because probabilities are misread as properties of events rather than reflexive weightings of construal. There is no “where” the strangeness hides; there is only reflexivity in the alignment of systemic potentials.

Taken together, these themes show not that time is broken, but that the conceptual metaphors themselves are misaligned. What needs rethinking is not time, but the reifications that sustain its paradoxes.

Beyond Entanglement: Indistinguishability as Collective Potential

A recent experiment has been making waves under the headline of “entanglement without entanglement.” On the surface, this seems paradoxical. Quantum entanglement has long been treated as the unique source of nonlocal correlations—the mysterious glue that binds distant particles together. If we observe correlations of the same strength without entanglement, the whole conceptual edifice looks unstable.

From the perspective of relational ontology, however, there is no paradox. The puzzle dissolves once we shift the frame.

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Relational structuring of potential

In relational terms, a system is not a set of individual particles, but a structured potential—a theory of possible instances. How the system is construed determines what kinds of correlations may be actualised.

• If particles are construed as distinguishable individuals, then potential is structured accordingly: each particle carries its own trajectory of possible events.

• If particles are construed as indistinguishable, the relational cut does not individuate them. Instead, the system is construed as a collective potential, where outcomes are constrained not by “this particle vs. that particle” but by their shared distribution.

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Indistinguishability as a relational cut

The experiment in question shows that when photons are made indistinguishable, they generate Bell-type correlations even without entanglement. From the orthodox view, this is puzzling: how can correlations exist without entanglement?

From our ontology, it is straightforward. The correlations arise because the system was construed as a collective potential. Actualisations (the detection events) align with this potential. The so-called “nonlocal correlations” are simply the reflex of outcomes being instantiated from a non-individuated collective.

Entanglement, in this light, is just one way of structuring relational potential. Indistinguishability is another. What matters is not the presence or absence of “entanglement,” but the relational form in which potential is construed.

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The Lesson

The mystery evaporates once we let go of the metaphysics of particles as things-in-themselves. What is fundamental is not entanglement, but the relational structuring of possibility. Correlations appear whenever actualisations align with a collective potential, whether construed through entanglement or indistinguishability.

This reframing shows how relational ontology can not only make sense of quantum experiments, but also dissolve the paradoxes that arise when we insist on interpreting phenomena through the lens of individuated objects.

The world is not stitched together by spooky bonds between distant particles. It is patterned by the ways in which potential is relationally construed—and by how events actualise within those patterns.

Interpretation as the Myth of the Missing Truth

For more than a century, quantum mechanics has been haunted by the so-called measurement problem: how do quantum superpositions become classical outcomes when observed? Physicists and philosophers have treated this as a matter of interpretation: which story about reality best explains the collapse from multiplicity to singularity? The Many Worlds interpretation says: all possible outcomes occur, just in different branches of reality. The hidden-variables camp insists: something unseen fills the gaps. Collapse models add mechanisms to force singularity into being. Each interpretation shifts the pieces, but none solves the riddle.

Relational ontology reframes the entire situation. The problem is not a gap between quantum formalism and classical reality. The problem is the assumption that there is an uninterpreted reality waiting to be matched by a privileged interpretation. But reality, as construed, is never outside interpretation — it is construal. The so-called “measurement problem” is simply the moment we notice that construal is constitutive, not supplementary.

Superposition is not an unresolved paradox in the world. It is the way a system of potential is construed before an instance is actualised. Collapse is not a physical discontinuity but a perspectival cut: a shift from theory to event, from potential to instance. The “observer” is not an external witness but the alignment of construal itself.

Thus the “myth of interpretation” is the belief that we are waiting for the right story to map theory onto reality. In fact, reality is always already constituted by the stories we cut into it. There is no missing stroke of inspiration that will finally reveal the truth of quantum mechanics. The truth is that truth itself is an effect of construal.

The Irreconcilability Illusion

Norma Sanchez asks whether general relativity and quantum physics are “irreconcilable.” It is a familiar refrain: two “grand theories,” one cosmic, one atomic, each elegant in isolation but mutually unintelligible. The myth here is not simply about their incompatibility — it is about the assumption that there must be a single, unified theory of reality that resolves all contradictions.

From a relational ontology perspective, this “irreconcilability” dissolves once we expose the construal at work. Both relativity and quantum mechanics are systems of theoretical potential — structured ways of construing physical phenomena. Relativity construes experience of massive bodies and curved spacetime; quantum mechanics construes phenomena of atomic and subatomic interaction. Each system is internally coherent, but coherence does not entail universal reach. To insist that the two must “fit together” is already to mistake theories for a pre-given reality they are supposed to represent.

Sanchez rightly notes that the problem arises when relativity is pushed below its construal horizon: the notion of “point particles” generates infinities that “make no sense.” But this is not a signal of failure. It is the mark of systemic cut-off: the limits of the potential that relativity theorises. Similarly, quantum mechanics, when extended upward to the cosmic scale, strains its own logic.

Attempts at reconciliation — string theory, quantised gravity, quantum spacetime — all presume that meaning is missing, waiting to be completed by some meta-framework. Relational ontology instead reframes the situation: the problem is not a broken reality needing a fix, but our demand for a single master construal. Reality is not “in pieces” to be glued together; it is always already construed through perspectives that are mutually delimiting.

In Sanchez’s hope that “the two frameworks can be united” through new observations, we hear the persistence of the myth: the belief that “more data” will force nature to speak in a single tongue. But data, too, are construed; observation never escapes the cut of theory. What new experiments will do is open fresh horizons of construal — new ways of coordinating, phasing, and aligning meaning at different scales.

Thus, the real task is not reconciliation, but recognition: physics is not fractured, it is perspectival. Relativity and quantum mechanics are not enemies awaiting a truce, but parallel cuts in the fabric of possibility. Their so-called “irreconcilability” is a symptom of the myth of the one true theory, a myth worth leaving behind.

Quantum Entanglement and the Misplaced Ghost of Einstein

Sabine Hossenfelder asks: did Einstein reject the idea of entanglement? The popular story says yes. The reality is more subtle: Einstein did not deny entanglement as a mathematical feature of quantum theory — he resisted the ontological claim that measurement instantaneously brings reality into being.

The confusion arises because two distinct issues were knotted together in the 1935 Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paper:

1. The measurement problem — how a quantum system shifts from a potential spread of outcomes to a single observed value.

2. Entanglement — correlation between subsystems such that neither can be fully described in isolation.

Einstein’s critique was directed at (1), not at (2). He found it intolerable that observation itself should be construed as the event that actualises reality, especially if this “update” propagated instantaneously across spacelike separation. Entanglement was a device he and his co-authors used to sharpen the paradox of measurement.

From a relational ontology perspective, the problem is easy to diagnose: a slippage of strata.

• Theory: Quantum mechanics is a system — a structured potential for how particles may be construed.

• Experiment: Measurement protocols instantiate this system, cutting across entangled states to yield determinate values.

• Metaphor: “Spooky action at a distance” reimagines this cut as a physical influence, as if observation itself were a signal racing faster than light.

The last step is the mistake. There is no ghostly signal. There is construal. An entangled system is re-construed when measurement carves out one actualisation from the spread of possibilities. The correlation persists not because one particle “informs” the other, but because both are already positioned within a single systemic potential.

Einstein did not reject entanglement; he rejected conflating a systemic update in construal with a physical process in spacetime. His worry was ontological: that physicists were treating their own act of cutting as if it were the world’s own mysterious self-intervention.

The irony is that Einstein’s complaint remains alive today — not as a flaw in the mathematics, but as a persistent confusion in how we construe it.

So the sharper lesson is not “Einstein was wrong about entanglement” but:

The ghost in quantum mechanics is not action at a distance, but the category mistake of treating construal as if it were causation.

Quantum Time Travel as a Category Mistake

Maria Violaris asks: has quantum physics made time travel possible? The answer depends less on physics than on ontology — on how we construe the relation between theory, experiment, and metaphor.

The discourse around “quantum time loops” repeatedly blurs three distinct levels of construal:

1. Systemic theory — general relativity and quantum mechanics as structured potentials for possible events.

2. Experimental construal — teleportation protocols and selective measurement as engineered instantiations of those potentials.

3. Metaphorical extension — talk of “time loops,” “discarding paradoxes,” and “sending particles to the past,” where systemic models are reimagined as literal phenomena.

The trouble begins when level three migrates back into level two. We are told: “the experimental results look identical to those from a real time loop.” But experimental results are not loops in spacetime. They are phenomena — construed outcomes of measurement within an engineered protocol. To treat them as equivalent is a category mistake.

What is actually happening?

• Teleportation protocols cut across entangled states, probabilistically constrained by measurement.

• Discarding failed outcomes is not nature “resolving paradoxes,” but the researcher filtering results to sustain consistency with an imagined systemic behaviour.

• The appearance of a time loop is not evidence of temporal travel, but an artefact of construal: the alignment of selective outcomes with a metaphor imported from relativity.

From a relational ontology perspective, “time travel” here is not a possible phenomenon but a shift of metaphor. The supposed paradox-resolution is not in the universe — it is in the construal.

So the sharper question is not “has quantum physics made time travel possible?” but:

What happens when metaphors from one theoretical system are imported into the construal of experimental events in another?

The answer: we mistake an artefact of construal for an instance of reality.