5 The Assumption of “Universality”

Physics often invokes universality: universal laws, constants, and principles that hold across all scales and contexts. Universality is treated as the ultimate guarantee of objectivity, the signature of a cosmos that is the same everywhere, for everyone, under all circumstances.

Yet universality is not given; it is inferred. What counts as universal emerges from repeated construal across frames, measurements, and perspectives. Constants are stabilised by method, models, and shared conventions; laws are recognised because patterns recur within the cuts we impose. The universe itself does not announce its universality — we construct it from relational regularities we observe and codify.

By naturalising universality as absolute, physics projects modulation onto what is modal: the potential patterns of relational alignment are misread as necessities. This slippage reinforces the illusion that laws, constants, and invariants exist independently of observation and construal. In reality, universality is a stabilised perspective, a reflection of repeated interpretation rather than a decree inscribed in nature.

Recognising universality as relational rather than absolute preserves the predictive and explanatory power of physics while exposing the hidden scaffolding: repeated cuts, perspectives, and relational assessments masquerade as cosmic decree. To see the frame is to understand that universality is not imposed by the universe but constructed through our engagement with it.