Physics tells itself a story of transparency: measurement reveals what is already there. The ruler discloses length; the detector unveils a particle; the experiment uncovers a pre-existing value.
Yet measurement is never neutral. It is an act of construction, not a passive reading. Instruments are not windows onto reality but construal devices, shaping what can appear and how it can be registered. To measure is to transform: to bring into being a phenomenon that did not exist “out there” in the same form beforehand.
By treating measurement as revelation, physics hides its own role in the production of reality. The observer becomes invisible, the construal recedes, and what is enacted is passed off as discovered. The error is not technical but ontological: mistaking a cut in relational potential for a property of being.
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