1 Nature’s Book of Secrets

Physics loves to cast itself as a detective story. Scientists are said to be “unlocking the secrets of nature” or “decoding the book of the universe.” This is more than a harmless metaphor. It smuggles in a metaphysical assumption: that nature is already written, a finished text with its meaning fixed in advance, waiting for us to decipher it.

The trouble is that no such script exists. There is no pre-authored cosmic manuscript. What we call “laws,” “constants,” and “principles” are not sentences in nature’s book but symbolic constructions — ways of cutting, aligning, and stabilising our experience so that it can be shared and coordinated. By imagining ourselves as readers of nature’s secrets, we mistake our own symbolic labour for transcription of an already-given truth.

This metaphor does double damage. First, it casts science as passive revelation rather than active construal. Second, it closes down the open-endedness of knowledge by imagining a final chapter: the last page of the book, where all mysteries will be resolved. But science does not read its way to closure; it constructs symbolic architectures that remain provisional, revisable, and perspectival.

Relationally, knowledge is not the discovery of a hidden script but the ongoing construction of shared architectures of construal. The universe is not a finished book we are deciphering. It is an unfinished manuscript we are collectively writing.