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.