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.

Quantum Myths Through Relational Ontology

Popular science loves to trade in “quantum myths” — half-truths that travel easily, but miss the deeper picture. Recently, six physicists set out to debunk a few of these misconceptions. Their corrections are useful, but they remain framed within the very metaphysics that generates the confusion. Through the lens of relational ontology, we can see why these myths persist — and why the corrections don’t go far enough.

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1. “Scientists haven’t managed to send particles back in time — yet.”

The humour is in the “yet.” The underlying assumption is that particles are little objects that could, in principle, be transported backwards along a universal timeline. But in relational ontology, time is not an absolute container waiting to be traversed. It is a dimension of alignment across events, cut from our construal of experience. To speak of a particle “going back in time” misconstrues both “particle” and “time” as things-in-themselves.

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2. “It’s one thing to have a quantum computer, but another to extract the right answer.”

Here we find a practical admission: quantum potential doesn’t translate neatly into determinate results. In relational terms, the system of potential is not identical to its actualisation. The “answer” does not pre-exist in the machine, waiting to be pulled out — it emerges in the cut from potential to event. The challenge is not extraction but construal: how to stabilise meaning across that cut.

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3. “Einstein didn’t reject entanglement as spooky action at a distance.”

This correction pushes back against the myth, but still assumes that entanglement describes a physical mechanism out there. From a relational perspective, entanglement is no more “spooky” than language. It is the reflexivity of construal across what we construe as separated instances. Einstein’s discomfort stemmed from his desire for a determinate system behind construal. But if construal is constitutive, there is no “behind.”

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4. “GR and QM can be reconciled by quantum spacetime.”

The dream of unification persists: general relativity and quantum mechanics must be stitched into a single theory. But reconciliation does not happen at the level of equations. Both theories already converge in ontology: each is a way of construing reflexive alignment — one across motion, one across possibility. A model of “quantum spacetime” may be elegant, but it does not solve the “problem” unless we recognise that construal itself is the ontological ground.

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5. “Quantum computing won’t break all encryption — probably.”

This is the myth of omnipotent potential. The assumption: quantum = limitless power. But potential is not actuality. Every actualisation requires a cut, and cuts bring constraints. Encryption may well survive not because quantum is weak, but because reflexive constraints are inescapable. No system of potential bypasses the constitutive role of construal.

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6. “There’s not yet a perfect interpretation of quantum mechanics.”

This is the heart of it. Physicists frame their quest as the search for the correct interpretation — the hidden reality behind the mathematics. But if construal is reality, then there can be no “perfect interpretation.” Interpretations are alternate construals of the same reflexive ground. The “stroke of inspiration” that physicists await will not reveal the truth behind quantum mechanics. It will reveal that truth itself is always a matter of construal.

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Conclusion

The myths, and their debunkings, both circle around the same blind spot: the assumption that there is a reality behind experience waiting to be captured. Relational ontology flips this around. Construal is not a veil over reality. It is the very ground of meaning and experience. What we call “quantum” is nothing spooky, mysterious, or mythic — it is the reflexive play of possibility itself, cut into event through construal.

The Mirage of Quantum Gravity: Category Errors in Scientific Discourse

1. Category Error: Treating Systems as Objects

A Nature article (here) consistently speaks as if “gravity” and “quantum mechanics” are things in the world with inherent natures, awaiting discovery.
From our standpoint, both are systemic theories — structured potentials for phenomena.
The question “Is gravity quantum?” assumes there is an ontological essence to be located, rather than acknowledging that the two are incommensurable construals until a new symbolic cut integrates them.

Effect: The discourse conceals the constructive nature of scientific integration, presenting it as passive observation.

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2. Obfuscation of the Cut

Every experimental proposal described is, in fact, a cut — a perspectival act that co-instantiates selected aspects of the two systems.
Yet the article frames these as tests of reality, implying that the phenomena are there regardless of the observer’s symbolic choices.

Effect: This hides the reflexive role of experiment in making the phenomenon it claims to measure.

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3. Reflexive Blindness

The narrative positions experiments as neutral, theory-independent arbiters. In practice:

• The choice of measurable quantity,

• The instrumentation design,

• The interpretive framework,
  …are all symbolic alignments that already presuppose a particular outcome space.

Effect: The article does not interrogate how these alignments predetermine what counts as “evidence” for quantum gravity.

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4. Slippage Between Phenomena and Metaphenomena

The piece oscillates between describing experimental setups (first-order phenomena) and making claims about the nature of reality (second-order metaphenomena) without marking the shift.
For example:

• “If we see X, gravity must be quantum” is a metaphenomenal statement.

• “We will measure Y in the lab” is a phenomenal statement.
  The lack of distinction lets the metaphenomenal claim pass as though it were an empirical description.

Effect: The reader is led to conflate empirical events with theoretical commitments.

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5. Erasure of Institutional Context

The drive toward tabletop “quantum gravity” experiments is not purely intellectual — it is shaped by:

• Funding landscapes favouring small-scale, rapid-turnaround science

• Prestige incentives for cross-domain breakthroughs

• The narrative appeal of “solving” physics’ biggest question in a lab setting
  Yet the article treats this as if it were an unmediated trajectory of scientific progress.

Effect: This depoliticises the phenomenon and erases the collective construal processes shaping the research.

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6. Illusion of Ontological Finality

The conclusion implies that once an experiment “confirms” gravity’s quantum nature, the ontological question will be settled.
From our view, such a result would simply instantiate a new symbolic architecture for physics — one whose stability would depend on continued alignment across theory, experiment, and institutional acceptance.

Effect: It presents scientific closure where there is, in fact, only a momentary stabilisation of meaning.

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Overall Assessment

The Nature article participates in the mainstream physics discourse that:

• Treats symbolic systems as if they were the world itself,

• Treats perspectival cuts as neutral acts of measurement,

• And elides the reflexive, constructive nature of theory–experiment integration.

A relational ontology reading recasts the story not as “closing in on nature’s answer,” but as actively building a shared symbolic frame in which “gravity” and “quantum” can coexist without contradiction — a frame that does not yet exist, and whose creation will be as much a social and semiotic process as a technical one.

Why Physicists Disagree Wildly On What Quantum Mechanics Says About Reality

A Nature survey (here) highlights a familiar but unresolved paradox: the most precise and successful theory in modern physics—quantum mechanics—still lacks a shared interpretation of what it means. Is the wavefunction real? Is quantum theory about particles, probabilities, information, or something else? After a century of extraordinary predictive power, physicists still disagree on whether the theory describes reality or merely models outcomes.

From the perspective of relational ontology, this confusion isn’t surprising. In fact, it’s precisely what we’d expect when modern physics is still working within metaphysical assumptions that quantum theory itself has already undermined.

Here are four key reframings:

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1. There is no “quantum world”—because there is no unconstrued world.

The debate assumes there’s a physical reality “out there” that quantum theory either does or does not describe. But relational ontology begins from a different starting point: phenomena are not things but construed events. A theory like quantum mechanics isn’t a mirror of a pre-existing world—it’s a structured potential for construal. The quantum wavefunction isn’t a “real object” or “just information”—it’s a system, a theory of possible instances, awaiting a perspectival cut.

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2. The observer–observed divide is not a mystery—it’s a misconstrual.

Quantum puzzles often hinge on the observer’s role in measurement. Does the observer collapse the wavefunction? What happens when no one is watching?

These questions presuppose a dualism between subject and object, knower and known. But relational ontology treats this distinction not as an ontological given, but as a cut within the system. The observer and observed are co-constituted in the act of construal. Measurement is not epistemic interference—it is actualisation within a potential.

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3. Wavefunction “reality” is a category mistake.

Physicists in the survey disagree on whether the wavefunction is real. But this assumes that “reality” is a simple category—either you exist or you don’t.

Relational ontology makes a sharper distinction: structured potentials are not actual entities, but neither are they fictions. The wavefunction belongs to the realm of system—a theoretical space of possibility. Its instantiation—what physicists call a measurement—is a perspectival shift, not a metaphysical transformation.

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4. Meaning precedes measurement.

Quantum experiments don’t generate raw data that later acquires meaning—they produce phenomena only through construal. The apparatus, the observable, the notion of “collapse”—these are not neutral or passive. They are symbolic selections within a semiotic system. The meaning of quantum events is not discovered but enacted.

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In sum: the survey reveals not just disagreement, but the limits of the metaphysical frame in which these debates are taking place. As long as quantum theory is interpreted through a lens that separates reality from construal, observer from observed, and theory from meaning, confusion will persist.

Relational ontology doesn’t offer another interpretation of quantum mechanics. It offers a reorientation: from what the theory says about the world to how the world arises in and through construal.

Why Quantum Theory Confounds Physicists: A Relational Ontology Perspective

For decades, physicists have struggled to make sense of quantum mechanics. Wavefunctions, superpositions, entanglement — these concepts seem almost magical, defying intuition and conventional logic. But the confusion isn’t a failure of intellect or mathematics; it’s a structural feature of how quantum theory construes reality.

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Quantum Mechanics as Systemic Potential

At its heart, quantum theory is a systemic potential — a formal structure that defines relational constraints among observables, probabilities, and measurement contexts. It is not a thing floating in the world, waiting to be discovered. It is a framework of possibility, a landscape of what can be instantiated when we perform specific symbolic cuts.

Physicists often make a critical misstep: they treat the wavefunction as an object with inherent reality, instead of recognising it as a potential for construal. This misalignment is the first source of the persistent “weirdness.”

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The Role of Symbolic Cuts

Every interpretation of quantum mechanics is a way of performing a symbolic cut — a perspectival act that selects which aspects of the potential become actualised instances:

• Copenhagen: Measurement creates the instance; the wavefunction “collapses” in this construal.

• Many-Worlds: All possible instances exist in branching universes; each observer experiences one branch.

• Bohmian Mechanics: Particles are guided by hidden variables; the instance is aligned with the system potential.

• Objective Collapse: Stochastic laws embedded in the system define which instances emerge.

• QBism: Outcomes are personal experiences; the agent updates beliefs based on the construal.

Each cut produces a coherent phenomenon — but only within its own symbolic frame.

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Instance Formation and Collective Uptake

An instance — the measured outcome, the particle observed, the branch experienced — emerges only through the cut. Without the cut, there is no event to observe.

But physics doesn’t operate in isolation. Stability of phenomena depends on collective uptake: alignment of observers, instruments, and institutional conventions. Textbooks, lab practices, peer review, and shared protocols all fix which cuts are treated as “normal” or “objective.” Confusion arises when the collective favours one cut rhetorically while multiple cuts remain valid.

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Paradoxes as Artefacts of Misaligned Cuts

Famous quantum paradoxes — Schrödinger’s cat, Wigner’s friend, nonlocal correlations — are not signs of reality misbehaving. They are artefacts of misaligned symbolic cuts, where system potentials are read as pre-existing objects instead of being reflexively constructed through experiment, observation, and interpretation.

Recognising this reflexivity dissolves the “weirdness.” Quantum mechanics is internally coherent; the challenge is aligning system, instance, and collective construal explicitly.

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Towards a Meta-Cut

A relational-ontology approach invites a meta-cut: a perspective that sees all interpretations as partial instantiations of the same systemic potential. No single interpretation is “true” in an absolute sense; each construes the potential differently. Paradoxes emerge only when one cut is treated as reality itself.

By making cuts explicit, acknowledging their reflexive nature, and situating phenomena within collective uptake, physicists can finally understand why quantum mechanics behaves as it does — not because the world is “crazy,” but because the act of observation, measurement, and interpretation creates the phenomena it describes.

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Conclusion

Quantum confusion is a structural feature of the theory, not a defect. From a relational ontology perspective:

1. Quantum theory is systemic potential.

2. Every interpretation performs a symbolic cut.

3. Instances arise only through cuts and collective alignment.

4. Paradoxes reflect misalignment, not ontological failure.

Understanding quantum mechanics thus requires reflexive awareness: an acknowledgment that the observer, the experiment, and the symbolic framework are co-creating the very phenomena physics seeks to describe.