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.