When Light Breaks Frame: Superluminality as Metaphor: Series Conclusion

Across these four posts, we have followed the arc from apparent scandal to conceptual clarity. “Superluminal propagation” is not a cosmic transgression but a linguistic one; the limits of physics are not the limits of the universe, but the limits of the metaphors that describe it.

Relational ontology offers a lens through which the universe does not send but aligns, does not move but reconfigures. Seen this way, speed limits dissolve into patterns of coherence, propagation becomes re-alignment, and simultaneity takes precedence over sequence.

To see the frame is to understand that the cosmos, in all its apparent anomalies, remains profoundly intelligible — once we recognise that intelligibility itself is a construction, written in the language we call physics.

When Light Breaks Frame: Superluminality as Metaphor: 4 Seeing the Frame: Light, Limit, and Language

We have traced the drama of “superluminal propagation” from headline scandal to semantic revelation. We have seen that speed, signal, and limit are not mere measurements but the pillars of a metaphorical edifice, a linguistic architecture that orders what counts as motion, causality, and possibility. And we have observed that when this architecture is strained, the apparent anomaly is never physical — it is discursive.

To see the frame is to recognise that physics, for all its precision, is a language performing its own ontology. Constants such as the speed of light do not simply constrain the universe; they constrain the descriptions that render the universe intelligible. They are rules of grammar, punctuation of potential, scaffolds for reasoning. And when “superluminal” effects appear, they are not transgressions of law but signals that the grammar has encountered configurations it cannot gracefully parse.

Relational ontology offers an alternative lens. Here, “propagation” is not the movement of a thing across space but the reconfiguration of relation within a system. Simultaneity is primary; sequence is secondary. Alignment precedes transmission. Viewed this way, the cosmos is not a stage for actors racing past limits but a choreography of potentials actualising in coordination, a symphony whose score is not measured in miles per second but in patterns of coherence.

Light itself, long treated as both messenger and measure, exemplifies this double role. When it appears to outrun itself, it is not a lawbreaker but a mirror reflecting the limitations of our metaphors. It reminds us that what we see through is inseparable from what we see with. Every “violation” is simultaneously a revelation: the universe is always more relational than our language allows, always more aligned than our sequence permits.

To see the frame is to step back from the spectacle of scandal and recognise the architecture beneath. It is to realise that the cosmos is drawn not only by physical law but by the metaphors that give law its intelligibility. And in doing so, we glimpse a quieter truth: the limits of speed are not the limits of reality, but the limits of description.

When Light Breaks Frame: Superluminality as Metaphor: 3 Superluminal Semantics: When Meaning Outruns Motion

Every so often a measurement bends the rules but not the universe. A gamma-ray flash that seems to outrun its own light, a pulse that exits a medium before it enters, an interference pattern that updates faster than a photon could travel. The data arrive draped in scandal, yet when the calculations settle, nothing has actually exceeded the limit. The effect evaporates into explanation. Still, the question lingers: what exactly has moved too fast?

What slips is not a particle but a meaning. “Superluminal propagation” is the name physics gives to a mis-timed translation between descriptions. Within the frame of motion and transmission, relation must be narrated as a sequence: this point affects that one across an interval. But nature does not always behave sequentially. Some configurations shift their relational alignment in ways that are simultaneous rather than successive. The language of travel insists on inserting a delay where none belongs.

Consider Nemiroff’s analyses: photons that seem to leap ahead of themselves, cosmic events that appear in the wrong order. Each “violation” resolves once we distinguish the representation from the relation. The signals never ran ahead; our construal did. We measured with a metaphor that cannot keep pace with the phenomenon it describes.

In this sense, the “superluminal” is a semantic artefact—a mirage cast by a vocabulary of motion applied to a reality of reconfiguration. The cosmos is not sending messages faster than light; it is re-aligning itself in a pattern that our discourse interprets as a race. We have mistaken the synchrony of relation for the velocity of transit.

Relational ontology suggests that nothing needs to cross a distance for change to occur. Systems actualise different potentials through alignment, not transport. To describe such re-alignment in the idiom of propagation is already to mislocate it in spacetime—to treat coherence as correspondence, simultaneity as sequence. The resulting “superluminality” is simply the sign that the metaphor has overreached its domain.

The scandal dissolves once we re-write the sentence. Where physics says “information travels,” we might say “relation reconfigures.” No violation, no paradox—only a shift in grammar. The cosmos has not broken its limit; our description has run out of syntax.

When Light Breaks Frame: Superluminality as Metaphor: 2 The Architecture of Limit: How Physics Frames Its Boundaries

Every science needs a boundary condition — a place where the world ends and the theory begins. For modern physics, that condition is spelled c. The speed of light is not merely a constant; it is the keystone in the arch that holds the conceptual edifice together. Remove it, and the whole structure trembles.

What we rarely notice is how architectural the metaphor already is. Physics imagines its universe as a building with walls, floors, thresholds. Within it, the “limit” functions as both constraint and guarantee: the frame that prevents collapse. It tells every quantity how far it may go before language itself ceases to make sense.

To describe a limit, however, is to imagine something approaching it — a motion toward the forbidden edge. Hence, the limit silently installs a traveller: the object that might someday reach it, test it, exceed it. Even as physics insists that nothing can cross the light-speed boundary, it keeps conjuring an imagined pursuer racing ever closer. The limit becomes an invitation written in prohibition’s ink.

This architecture of limit depends on three metaphors so familiar we have forgotten they are metaphors at all: speed, signal, and medium.

• Speed presupposes separable entities and measurable distance: an actor and a stage.

• Signal turns relation into transaction: something sent, something received.

• Medium re-introduces substance as courier: a background that carries meaning across emptiness.

Together they compose an ontology of transmission — a cosmos that must communicate with itself in parcels of energy and time. The light-speed limit, then, is the grammatical ceiling that keeps this communicative architecture coherent.

What happens when “superluminal propagation” appears is not the shattering of a law but the exposure of this architecture’s joints. The supposed anomaly reminds us that “limit” is not a property of the universe but of a discourse that pictures the universe in certain ways. It marks the seam where metaphoric construction shows through the plaster.

If we were to redraw the blueprint, we might replace the architecture of limit with an architecture of alignment. Relation would no longer depend on traversal or transmission; simultaneity would not need to move. The universe would not be a building at all, but a choreography of co-position — systems reconfiguring their internal alignments rather than racing toward walls.

To see the frame is to realise that physics’ most sacred constant is also its most eloquent metaphor. The light-speed limit does not constrain the cosmos; it constrains how the cosmos may be spoken.

When Light Breaks Frame: Superluminality as Metaphor: 1 The Scandal of Speed: When Light Appears to Cheat

Every few years, physics appears to flirt with transgression. A new experiment, a novel measurement, a light curve that seems to arrive too early or decay too fast — and the headlines whisper the same forbidden phrase: faster than light. The announcement is always accompanied by the same ritual gestures: a hushed fascination, a faint sense of cosmic impropriety, followed by a hasty reassurance that no physical laws have been broken.

But the real drama is not physical; it is linguistic. “Superluminal propagation” is less an event in nature than a scandal in discourse — the moment when the metaphors that sustain physics momentarily lose their grip. The universe does not blush at such reports; only our descriptions do.

Light speed is not simply a number; it is the measure that organises modern physics’ sense of order itself. It defines the scale of simultaneity, causality, and even possibility. To exceed it is to exit the architecture of intelligibility that physics has built around it. The phrase “nothing can travel faster than light” functions less as an empirical claim than as a grammatical rule of the cosmos — a constraint on how motion, signal, and event can be said to relate.

Hence the drama. “Superluminal propagation” does not suggest that nature has misbehaved, but that language has. The scandal of speed is the scandal of metaphor: that a conceptual system framed in terms of movement through space should find itself unable to describe relations that do not conform to movement at all.

The very terms of physics betray their figurative origins. Speed presupposes a traversable distance and a measurable interval. Propagation presumes a medium that carries something from here to there. Limit implies an external boundary, a frontier to be tested. These metaphors stabilise the world as a scene of discrete entities and causal transmissions — an ontology of things moving across an empty stage. Within such a frame, light speed becomes the ultimate stage direction: “no actor may exit faster than this.”

When “superluminal” effects appear, the audience gasps because the play seems to violate its own script. But perhaps what we witness is not defiance of law, only a miscasting of relation. The cosmos has not changed character; our staging has momentarily collapsed under its own metaphors.

To treat this properly, we would need to ask not what is moving faster than light, but what construal makes it appear so. For every scandal in physics hides a misalignment of meaning: a case where relational simultaneity is mistaken for sequential motion, where alignment is narrated as travel. The scandal of speed, then, is the scandal of our insistence that all relation must be measured in miles per second.

When Light Breaks Frame: Superluminality as Metaphor: Series Introduction

Every once in a while, physics seems to flout its own laws. Headlines trumpet “faster-than-light” phenomena, scientists check their instruments, and the public wonders if the cosmos has gone rogue. Yet beneath these momentary scandals lies a subtler story — one not about particles, pulses, or photons, but about the metaphors that structure our understanding.

This series investigates how physics construes the universe through the language of speed, signal, and limit. By examining “superluminal propagation” through a meta-critical lens, we reveal how apparent violations of light speed are never breaches of law, but exposures of the conceptual architecture sustaining it.

From the scandal of speed to the architecture of limit, from superluminal semantics to the final reflection on seeing the frame itself, this series traces a path from headline drama to relational insight: the cosmos is always more aligned than our metaphors permit.

Retrospective: Physics as Symbolic Architecture

This series has traced a pivot: from physics as revelation of hidden truths to physics as symbolic architecture. Along the way, we reframed familiar metaphors, displaced old theological ambitions, and explored the generativity of theory as scaffolding for collective life. What emerges is not a diminished view of physics, but a richer one: physics as one of the cosmos’s own reflexive practices, staging possibilities through us.

The Arc Revisited

The opening essay, Physics as Symbolic Architecture, set the keystone: physics is not about mirroring reality but about constructing symbolic scaffolding for construal. Theories cut potential, align meaning with matter, and stage possible worlds. From there, Physics as Myth-Making extended the frame: theories are not just equations but cosmogonies. Physics generates modern myths of origin and destiny—from Newton’s clockwork universe to quantum multiverses—that rival and displace older religious narratives.

The third essay, Physics as Scaffolding, brought the metaphor down to ground. Theories do not reveal a hidden code but enable collective coordination. Relativity allows GPS to function; quantum mechanics scaffolds semiconductors and lasers. Each theory is less a revelation than an infrastructure for alignment.

From there, Physics as Invention of Possibility turned decisively against the discovery myth. Physics does not excavate eternal truths—it invents symbolic conditions of possibility. Newton invented determinism as systemic; Einstein invented relativity of simultaneity; quantum theory invented indeterminacy. Each invention reorganises potential, creating worlds that could not be lived within before.

In Physics as Reflexive Alignment, we shifted perspective again. Physics is not outside the world it describes but part of the world’s self-construal. It is the cosmos aligning itself symbolically through us. Theories do not merely describe—they feed back into practice, technology, and culture, reconfiguring the very reality they are said to reflect.

Finally, Physics Without Absolutisation warned against the lure of closure. To absolutise physics is to confuse scaffolding with essence, invention with revelation. No theory is final. To release physics from its theological temptations is to allow it to thrive as open symbolic architecture: generative, reflexive, and alive.

From Critique to Construction

This constructive phase has marked a shift from dismantling misconceptions to building new frames. Where earlier work unmasked the metaphysical traps of mirroring and absolutisation, here the emphasis has been positive: how physics functions as symbolic invention, as scaffolding, as myth, as reflexive practice.

The series has shown that to think of physics symbolically is not to strip it of value but to recognise its deeper role. Physics is not a neutral description of a world “out there.” It is an infrastructural and mythic architecture of our collective becoming. It generates the symbolic cuts through which the cosmos construes itself reflexively, and through which we coordinate meaning and matter at scale.

What Opens Next

Looking back, this reframing opens onto several horizons. First, it clears space for a non-theological engagement with physics. By refusing absolutisation, we release physics from the burden of ultimate truth and affirm its generativity as open symbolic architecture.

Second, it situates physics within a broader symbolic ecology. Theories are not unique in their world-making power; they stand alongside myth, art, language, and ritual as ways of cutting and aligning potential. Physics becomes one symbolic infrastructure among others, participating in the collective architectures of meaning.

Third, it opens the door to thinking beyond physics. If physics is symbolic architecture, then so too are economics, politics, biology, and culture. Each invents possibilities, scaffolds practices, and aligns collectives. The reflexivity we have traced in physics may be the broader principle of symbolic life itself.

Closure: Toward New Architectures

Physics as Symbolic Architecture was never meant as a final word. It is itself a scaffolding: a cut, a way of staging physics differently, of opening other symbolic possibilities. The series has traced a path from myth to scaffold, from invention to reflexivity, from theology to open architecture.

Physics is not a mirror of reality, nor a code to be deciphered. It is one of the cosmos’s own symbolic architectures, cutting itself reflexively through us. To recognise this is not to diminish physics but to free it—so that it may continue inventing, scaffolding, aligning, and creating.

The task now is to carry this reframing beyond physics: to explore symbolic architectures wherever they arise, and to see in them the reflexive labour of the cosmos building worlds through construal. Physics was only the beginning.

Physics Without Absolutisation

Physics has always been haunted by a dream of closure. The quest for a “theory of everything” promises not just another advance but the final word: a system of equations that captures reality in its entirety. This theological ambition—physics as revelation of the ultimate—runs deep. From Newton’s universal laws to contemporary string theory, the hope has been that physics can deliver not just scaffolds for construal but the very essence of being itself.

But absolutisation is a trap. To treat any theory as ontological closure is to mistake scaffolding for architecture, symbolic invention for eternal truth. It confuses the generativity of physics with the fantasy of finality.

The Problem of Absolutisation

When theories are absolutised, they cease to function as scaffolds for construal and become idols of truth. The symbolic architecture hardens into dogma. Instead of enabling new possibilities, the theory is treated as the endpoint of thought, the definitive code of reality.

This temptation is understandable. Absolutisation promises security: a universe finally pinned down, with no remainder. But it is also corrosive. It shuts down the inventive, reflexive, and generative dimensions of physics. It collapses the symbolic openness of construal into the closure of ontology. And in doing so, it confuses physics with theology: a doctrine of ultimate reality masquerading as science.

Reframing: Open Symbolic Architecture

From a relational ontological perspective, no theory can deliver ontological closure. Each is a symbolic architecture for cutting potential, aligning meaning and matter, and staging possibilities. Each is partial, provisional, and enabling. Theories are not mirrors of reality but scaffolds within which construal and coordination unfold.

To release physics from absolutisation is to honour its true power: its capacity to invent, scaffold, and align without presuming finality. Physics thrives not as theology but as open symbolic architecture—ever reconfiguring, ever staging new possibilities, ever reorganising collective life.

Expansion: The Freedom of Non-Closure

Recognising the impossibility of closure does not diminish physics; it liberates it. Freed from the burden of being “the final word,” physics can embrace its generativity. Newtonian mechanics, relativity, and quantum theory are not steps toward a final destination but inventions of new symbolic architectures. Each expands what can be coordinated, predicted, and imagined.

This openness is what allows physics to sustain cultural vitality. It can generate myths of origin and destiny, scaffold technological worlds, invent new possibilities of thought and practice—without pretending to be the last word. Physics is most alive when it accepts its provisionality, its role as an open-ended architecture rather than a closed ontology.

Closure: Beyond Theology, Toward Generativity

The dream of a theory of everything is a theological temptation. It promises closure where none is possible. To absolutise physics is to mistake its scaffolds for reality itself.

But physics does not need closure to matter. Its power lies in its openness: its ability to cut potential in new ways, to scaffold new forms of life, to align cosmos and culture through symbolic invention. To recognise this is to see physics not as theology in disguise, but as the cosmos reflexively building, through us, an ever-expanding symbolic architecture.

Physics without absolutisation is physics at its most powerful—free to invent, free to scaffold, free to align, free to create.

Physics as Reflexive Alignment

Physics is often imagined as an external gaze: a detached account of the universe “out there,” written from a neutral standpoint. The scientist is cast as observer, the cosmos as object, and the theory as mirror. But this picture is misleading. Physics is not outside the world it describes—it is one of the ways the world reflexively aligns itself through symbolic construal. Physics is not a commentary on the cosmos; it is the cosmos staging a commentary on itself.

The Problem with the View from Nowhere

The myth of objectivity in physics rests on the fantasy of the “view from nowhere.” It suggests that theories can float above situated practices, providing a pure account of reality as it is. This misrecognises the reflexive nature of construal. Every theory is produced within a system of practices, technologies, languages, and instruments. Every measurement is an act of construal, cutting potential into actualities. Every equation is a symbolic alignment shaped within history, culture, and collective life.

To imagine that physics is detached from this reflexive context is to erase the very conditions that make it possible. Theories do not simply describe the world—they participate in it. They reorganise practices, scaffold technologies, and reshape horizons of meaning. Physics is not an outside perspective on reality but an inside process through which reality aligns itself symbolically.

Reframing: Reflexive Alignment

From a relational ontological perspective, physics is reflexive alignment: the cosmos cutting itself symbolically through human construal. Theories emerge not as mirrors but as alignments—ways of staging regularities, potentialities, and possibilities in symbolic form. They are reflexive in two senses: they arise from within the cosmos, and they act back upon it, reconfiguring how events unfold, how possibilities are realised, how practices are coordinated.

Physics is thus part of the world’s own reflexive self-organisation. It is not knowledge standing apart from being; it is being cutting itself symbolically, staging new alignments of meaning and matter.

Expansion: From Alignment to Self-Construal

Examples abound. The invention of relativity is not simply a recognition of how space and time “really are.” It is a reflexive re-alignment: new symbolic cuts that reshape how simultaneity, velocity, and causality can be construed. This alignment feeds back into the cosmos through technologies—satellite systems, particle accelerators, nuclear energy—that reconfigure both matter and meaning.

Quantum mechanics, likewise, is not an external map of an already-existing domain. It is a reflexive architecture for aligning indeterminacy, probability, and measurement. It is the cosmos symbolically staging its own systemic openness through human practice, and then looping back through technologies that transform material and social life.

Seeing physics this way allows us to grasp its cultural role as well. Physics does not simply add facts to a storehouse of knowledge; it generates symbolic alignments that re-situate humanity’s place in the cosmos. It gives shape to collective imaginaries—from Newton’s clockwork determinism to the quantum openness of possibility. Each alignment is both descriptive and world-making, both theoretical and practical, both symbolic and material.

Closure: The Cosmos Aligning Itself

Physics is not an external gaze upon a passive universe. It is a reflexive practice through which the universe symbolically aligns itself. Theories are not windows onto reality but scaffolds of self-construal, architectures in which the cosmos stages its own symbolic cut.

To see physics this way is to grasp its radical intimacy. We are not outsiders looking in; we are participants in the cosmos’s own reflexive alignment, its symbolic self-articulation. Physics is the cosmos, through us, aligning itself to itself.

Physics as Invention of Possibility

Physics is often narrated as a story of discovery: truths hidden in nature, gradually uncovered by human ingenuity. Newton “discovered” gravity, Einstein “discovered” relativity, quantum physicists “discovered” uncertainty. But this narrative of revelation conceals more than it reveals. Physics is not a slow unveiling of a prewritten script; it is an invention of new symbolic possibilities. Each theoretical shift is not the discovery of an eternal truth but the creation of new architectures through which the world can be construed, acted on, and lived within.

The Problem with Discovery

The discovery narrative rests on an absolutising metaphor: that reality contains timeless structures waiting to be unearthed. Physics, in this telling, is a kind of archaeology of the cosmos. But this obscures the active, constructive, and inventive labour of theory. When Newton articulated his laws of motion, he did not “find” them inscribed in nature. He invented a symbolic order that made determinism a systemic possibility—a scaffold for prediction, navigation, and mechanical design.

Treating physics as discovery also traps us in an outdated epistemology: the idea that knowledge passively reflects reality. This ignores the generativity of construal. Theories are not mirrors but symbolic architectures. They do not simply correspond; they reorganise potential. To treat them as discoveries is to erase the creativity of invention, the reflexive labour by which humans and cosmos co-construct new conditions of possibility.

Reframing: Physics as Invention

From a relational ontological perspective, physics is invention: the cutting of symbolic potential into new architectures of alignment. Newton did not find determinism—he invented it as a systemic possibility. Einstein did not uncover relativity—he invented simultaneity as perspectival and velocity-dependent. Quantum theorists did not stumble on indeterminacy—they invented it as a systemic condition for describing phenomena.

These inventions are not arbitrary; they are anchored in the relational interplay of meaning and matter. But they are inventions nonetheless: new ways of staging reality, new scaffolds for prediction and coordination, new symbolic architectures for collective life.

Expansion: Inventions that Restructure Worlds

Thinking of physics as invention reveals the creativity at the heart of its practice. Each invention reorganises not only scientific discourse but entire cultural horizons. Newton’s mechanics invented a world of calculable regularity, birthing the modern machine age. Einstein’s relativity invented a cosmos without absolute simultaneity, transforming our conceptions of time, space, and causality. Quantum theory invented systemic indeterminacy, seeding a century of technological revolutions from semiconductors to quantum computing.

These are not merely descriptive shifts; they are world-inventing. They create new symbolic possibilities that cascade outward into practice, culture, and imagination. They alter what it means to act, to predict, to intervene. Physics, in this sense, is not a lens onto a fixed reality but a forge in which new symbolic conditions of reality are continuously hammered out.

Closure: The Generativity of Physics

To frame physics as invention is to release it from the myth of discovery and to acknowledge its creative power. Physics is not the passive uncovering of a hidden order but the active invention of symbolic architectures that restructure possibility itself. Each theoretical advance is a new way for the cosmos to construe itself through us—new scaffolds for meaning, matter, and coordination.

Physics is not archaeology; it is architecture. It is not a revelation of what always was, but an invention of what can be.

Physics as Scaffolding

Physics is often presented as the hidden code beneath reality, a set of equations written in the cosmos itself. The story goes that once we decipher this code, we can unlock the truth of the universe. But this image of physics as revelation—of a final unveiling—is misleading. Physics does not disclose a pre-written script; it constructs symbolic frameworks that scaffold our shared coordination with the world.

The Problem with the “Code” Metaphor

The fantasy of physics as code carries two powerful but misleading implications. First, it suggests that reality is already inscribed, waiting for us to uncover it—as if nature were a book and physics the act of reading. Second, it positions physicists as privileged translators of this divine text, a priesthood of those who can speak the language of the cosmos. Both obscure the actual practice of physics, which is far less about deciphering a hidden script and far more about enabling us to construe, predict, and act together.

When we treat theories as secret keys to reality, we miss their practical function. Theories are scaffolds: they enable practices, instruments, and infrastructures. Newtonian mechanics did not reveal the eternal truth of the universe; it made possible the coordination of ships across oceans, the prediction of planetary motion, the engineering of machines. Einstein’s relativity was not a mystical glimpse into the essence of space-time; it provided a new symbolic structure for synchronising clocks, calibrating satellites, and re-situating how simultaneity could be construed.

Reframing: Physics as Symbolic Scaffolding

In relational ontology, there is no uninterpreted “real” waiting to be disclosed. What exists are systems of potential, and what physics provides are symbolic architectures for cutting and aligning that potential. Theories scaffold the way we construe events: they stage how matter and meaning line up, how regularities can be projected, how possibilities can be realised.

Scaffolding is temporary, partial, and enabling. A scaffold doesn’t reveal a hidden building—it provides the structure within which building becomes possible. In the same way, physics doesn’t reveal an underlying ontology; it constructs the frameworks through which technological, scientific, and cultural projects can be staged.

Expansion: From Equations to Infrastructures

Once we see physics as scaffolding, we notice how deeply its symbolic frameworks permeate collective life. Consider GPS: its functioning depends on relativistic corrections to satellite clocks. Without Einstein’s symbolic cut into simultaneity, everyday navigation systems would drift into uselessness. Or consider quantum mechanics: not a glimpse into metaphysical indeterminacy, but a scaffold enabling lasers, semiconductors, and MRI machines.

Physics, in this sense, is infrastructural. It underwrites practices of measurement, prediction, and intervention. It does not bring us closer to the “truth of reality,” but allows us to coordinate collectively at scales and with precisions that would otherwise be impossible. It provides symbolic architectures that hold together entire technological and social ecologies.

This reframing also changes how we think about the history of physics. Each theoretical revolution—Newtonian, relativistic, quantum—was not a step closer to reality’s hidden core but a reorganisation of symbolic scaffolding. Old frameworks proved insufficient for sustaining new practices; new scaffolds were constructed to extend what could be coordinated, predicted, and aligned.

Closure: Physics as Collective Architecture

Physics is less a mirror of the world than a staging ground for collective alignment. Its theories do not reveal an ontological essence; they construct symbolic architectures that make possible the infrastructures of modern life. To see physics as scaffolding is to recognise its generativity: its power lies not in deciphering reality’s secret code but in building the frameworks within which construal and coordination can unfold.

Physics is not the language of the cosmos; it is the symbolic architecture through which the cosmos, reflexively, scaffolds itself through us.

Physics as Myth-Making: Construal, Not Cosmos

In popular and academic accounts alike, physics is often narrated as if it were uncovering the truths of the universe—eternal, external, and waiting to be discovered. We speak of “fundamental forces,” “the building blocks of reality,” and “the code of the cosmos” with a kind of reverential inevitability. Yet, from a relational perspective, these are not unmediated revelations of a pre-existing world. They are symbolic architectures, frameworks we construct to organise, predict, and communicate potential phenomena.

The allure of myth in physics is understandable. Human cognition gravitates toward stories that explain why the universe behaves as it does. A particle is “weird” not merely because it defies classical expectations, but because our symbolic scaffolding—our construal of possibility and instantiation—cannot be directly translated into ordinary language. To describe quantum mechanics, relativity, or string theory in anthropomorphic or mechanistic terms is to smooth over the discontinuities between theory, measurement, and observation. It is, in effect, myth-making: a narrative device that makes the abstract concrete and the potential seem actual.

The danger arises when these narratives are taken literally. Mechanistic metaphors, cosmic codes, or statements about the universe “observing itself” can seduce physicists and readers alike into ontological commitments they have not actually justified. When a quantum field is described as a “sea of fluctuations” or the cosmos as a “cosmic symphony,” the prose evokes substance and agency where only relational potential exists. The risk is twofold: it erases the perspectival nature of the construal, and it projects our symbolic choices onto the universe as if they were independent realities.

Relational ontology offers a corrective. The phenomena physics describes are not objects with inherent properties but events actualised through symbolic cuts—instances in which theory, observation, and social agreement converge. The “laws” of physics are not prescriptions written into matter; they are the stable alignments that emerge when repeated construals cohere. Myth, in this light, is not falsehood—it is a heuristic. But it must be recognised as such, lest heuristic metaphor harden into metaphysical assertion.

By viewing physics as a process of myth-making—of constructive construal rather than passive discovery—we open space for a more reflexive science. One that acknowledges the role of instruments, concepts, and human interpretation in shaping what counts as “real.” One that sees the cosmos not as a pre-assembled machine or a code to decode, but as a field of potential relations whose structures we map and stabilise.

In short, physics does not reveal the universe as it “is.” It reveals the universe as we can coherently construe it, moment by moment, through the meticulous alignment of symbolic and experimental acts. Understanding this does not diminish physics; it illuminates its creative and provisional power, reminding us that even our most precise theories are stories of possibility, not tablets of finality.

Physics as Symbolic Architecture

Physics has long narrated itself as the discipline that reveals reality’s inner workings. Its metaphors are of unveiling, discovery, penetration into the hidden core of the cosmos. The physicist is cast as a kind of explorer, prying open nature’s secrets and recording what is found inside. From Newton’s divine mechanic, to Einstein’s geometric poet, to the string theorist’s virtuoso of hidden dimensions, the image repeats: physics mirrors the real.

This narrative is powerful, but it rests on an ontological mistake. It treats symbolic architecture as ontological furniture. That is, it confuses our ways of construing possibility with the structures of being itself. Equations are taken not as symbolic cuts through potential, but as inscriptions of the world’s literal blueprint.

Relational ontology allows us to reframe this. A system is not a hidden entity waiting to be unveiled; it is a theory of possible instances, a structured potential. When physicists produce models and equations, they are not deciphering reality’s code but staging possible construals of alignment between meaning and event. A theory is a scaffolding for symbolic coordination, not a mirror of nature.

If we look at the history of physics through this lens, its “progress” appears in a new light.

• Classical mechanics construed reality as a deterministic apparatus. Motion was coordinated through force, time, and mass, aligning the symbolic cut of cause-and-effect with the experience of regularity.

• Relativity rebuilt the scaffolding in geometric terms. Events were aligned with curvature, simultaneity was cut perspectivally, and the architecture shifted from force to spacetime.

• Quantum theory staged yet another cut: potential itself construed as probabilistic, systemic possibilities actualised in perspectival events.

In each case, what is at stake is not unveiling but reorganising symbolic possibility. Physics invents new architectures that allow us to construe, coordinate, and extend our horizons of potential.

This does not make physics less powerful — quite the opposite. Its achievements are real not because they mirror nature, but because they reorganise how meaning and matter can align. A successful theory is one that scaffolds new forms of construal: new instruments, new practices, new collective myths of matter. Newton’s cosmos of clockwork gears, Einstein’s fabric of spacetime, Feynman’s sum-over-histories — each of these is less a description than a symbolic cosmos in its own right.

What of physics today? String theory is often dismissed as untestable speculation. But perhaps the deeper issue is not empirical but ontological. Its talk of hidden strings, higher dimensions, and cosmic landscapes is not the unearthing of an ultimate reality, but the proposal of a new symbolic scaffolding. The relevant question is not whether strings “exist,” but what possibilities of construal they make possible — what new alignments of event and meaning they afford.

This shift in stance carries consequences. It denies physics the lure of absolutisation: the fantasy of a final theory, a theory of everything. No symbolic architecture can close the gap between system and instance, potential and event, meaning and matter. Theories can only ever construe; they cannot transcribe.

But this is not a weakness — it is the very strength of physics. Its vitality lies in its creativity, in the invention of new architectures of construal. To demand that physics mirror reality is to impoverish it, reducing its craft to stenography. To recognise it as symbolic architecture is to restore its dignity as a generative art of possibility.

Physics, then, is not the discovery of what is, but the invention of how we may construe what can be. Its theories are less mirrors than bridges, less secrets uncovered than architectures built. To take physics seriously is not to mistake scaffolding for reality, but to inhabit its architectures reflexively — to see them as cuts in potential, ways of aligning with the world, and symbolic horizons of the real.