Introduction: When Worlds Collide
For over a century, physicists have struggled to reconcile the two great pillars of modern science: quantum mechanics and general relativity. The first seems to depict a probabilistic realm of potentials that only snap into actuality through observation; the second, a deterministic curvature of space-time shaped by mass and energy. These frameworks seem to speak different languages—one of uncertainty, the other of geometry.
But perhaps this opposition is a mirage. If we approach both theories through a relational model in which space and time are not absolutes but dimensions enacted by process, we may find continuity rather than contradiction. From this perspective, quantum mechanics and general relativity describe different constraints on how meaning is instantiated from potential.
What Quantum Mechanics and Relativity Both Get Right
Quantum mechanics recognises that what we call "reality" is, at its base, a field of potentials. The wavefunction does not describe where a particle is, but where it might be. Reality becomes actual only when a potential is instantiated—a notion aligned with the view that meaning is made through observation.
General relativity, meanwhile, recognises that space and time are not absolute backgrounds. They are not "containers" in which things happen, but relational dimensions shaped by mass-energy. Time slows, space contracts—not because a medium is bending, but because the very conditions for process instantiation have changed.
Despite their differences, both theories describe a world where space and time are contingent. They do not precede process; they emerge with it.
Meaning-Making and Process Instantiation
In a relational ontology informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics, meaning is not found but made. Processes instantiate space and time; they do not simply unfold within them. The observer is not a neutral instrument but a participant whose meaning potential conditions what is instantiated.
The act of observation is not a passive registration but a transformation: potential becomes instance, and the cosmos takes on structure through the unfolding of meaning. In this view, both quantum and relativistic effects are not peculiarities of scale, but different types of constraint on the same basic phenomenon: the actualisation of potential.
Constraints in the Quantum Domain
In quantum mechanics, the constraints are delicate, local, and probabilistic. The wavefunction is a map of structured potential—a system of constraints on what might be instantiated. Measurement is the point at which one of those possibilities becomes actual, not through a device alone, but through observation: the construal of an instance from the observer's meaning potential.
Entanglement reflects a relational constraint. The instantiation of one process affects the potential structure of another, no matter how far apart they are. The spatial separation is not what matters; the potential relation is.
Constraints in the Relativistic Domain
In general relativity, the constraints operate at a different scale. Here, it is not probabilities but gravitational fields that shape process instantiation. Time dilation and spatial contraction are not distortions of a neutral stage, but changes in how unfolding processes realise temporal and spatial intervals.
Mass-energy determines not the shape of space-time, but the conditions under which instances of space and time may be instantiated. What looks like geometry is in fact a macro-level constraint on meaning's unfolding.
The Continuity Between Them
Seen through this relational lens, the contradiction between quantum mechanics and relativity dissolves. Both describe how potential becomes instance under different types of constraint.
Quantum mechanics deals in fine-grained, stochastic constraints—a local theatre of potentiality. Relativity deals in coarse, gravitational constraints—a global architecture of unfolding. But the underlying logic is the same: neither space nor time is primary. What is primary is the process, and how it instantiates dimensions according to context.
The observer, too, is continuous across these domains. In both, observation is the moment of construal, when potential is collapsed into instance. The world does not exist apart from this enactment. It is constituted through it.
Closing Reflection: A Universe of Semiotic Fields
Perhaps the deepest continuity between quantum mechanics and relativity is not physical but semiotic. The universe is not a theatre of objects in motion, nor a mesh of forces and curves. It is a field of meaning potentials, constrained and instantiated through process.
Space and time are not the canvas but the brushstrokes—not the preconditions of being but the outcomes of becoming. In every domain, from the spin of a particle to the spin of a galaxy, the cosmos unfolds as meaning: structured, constrained, and relational.
And in this light, the divide between the quantum and the relativistic is not a rift but a rhythm—the dance of potential and instance, harmonised across the scales of existence.
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