Quantum Gravity as a Final Answer

Popular and even specialist discourse often frames the quest for quantum gravity as the pursuit of nature’s ultimate truth: a final, definitive theory that will resolve the tension between general relativity and quantum mechanics. This framing carries an implicit promise of ontological closure — as if, once discovered, the quantum nature of gravity will answer the question of “what gravity really is.”

From a relational standpoint, this is a category error. There is no single, pre-existing entity called “quantum gravity” waiting to be uncovered. Instead, what we call quantum gravity is a potential symbolic architecture: a set of relational patterns and experimental construals that allow previously incompatible systems to be coherently aligned. The theory does not discover a preordained reality; it constructs a framework in which phenomena previously seen as disjointed can be meaningfully related.

This misframing has consequences. It erases the role of the observer, the cut, and the institutional and social scaffolding that shapes which experiments are proposed, funded, and interpreted as successful. It suggests a linear trajectory of progress culminating in a metaphysical fact, when in reality the evolution of physics is iterative, reflexive, and contingent on symbolic and collective acts of alignment.

Relational ontology reframes the ambition: quantum gravity is not a final answer, it is an ongoing articulation. Each experiment, each calculation, each model contributes to a provisional stabilisation of symbolic relations across theoretical and observational domains. Success is not the uncovering of truth but the creation of coherence.

Gravity does not need a quantum crown to reign; it needs thoughtful articulation within the relational architectures we actively construct.