Quantum Gravity and the Primacy of Process: Towards a Relational Theory of Everything
Opening Provocation
Physicists have spent a century trying to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics. But what if the problem isn't the theories—it's the ontology? What if space, time, and even particles are not fundamental—but the instantiation of process is?
1. The Crisis in Physics Isn’t Just Technical—It’s Ontological
General relativity treats spacetime as a continuous, curved manifold. Quantum mechanics treats reality as a cloud of potential until observed. Every unification effort—string theory, loop quantum gravity, causal sets, spin networks—tries to force one framework into the language of the other.
But what if both are emergent descriptions of something deeper? Not things in space and time, but space and time themselves as emergent from the unfolding of processes.
2. Relational Reframe: Space and Time as Processual Dimensions
Space is the dimensionality of co-instantiated entities. It is the structured relation between instances.
Time is the dimensionality of unfolding. It is not a backdrop through which things move, but the order in which a process unfolds.
These dimensions aren’t fixed or absolute—they are instantiated differently depending on constraints, such as the relation to a gravitational field.
3. General Relativity Rewritten: Constraint on Process Instantiation
In general relativity, gravity curves spacetime. But in a relational model:
Mass-energy alters the conditions under which spatial and temporal intervals are instantiated.
Gravitational time dilation is not a warping of clocks, but a slowing in the rate of process unfolding.
Geodesics describe not the shortest path in curved space, but the most efficient conditions for a process to unfold.
This reframe removes the paradox of treating spacetime as both an abstract coordinate system and a physically real entity.
4. Quantum Mechanics Rewritten: Potential-to-Instance Transition
Quantum mechanics already treats reality as potential until observed. In the relational model:
The wavefunction is the structured potential for process instantiation.
Measurement is the point at which a process is instantiated—by an external observer, as the construal of meaning.
Entanglement is not action at a distance but co-instantiation: meaning-structures in one part of the system constrain those in another, regardless of spatial separation.
This reframes collapse as an epistemological act: the transition from potential to instance, from possible to actual.
5. Where They Meet: Gravity as Emergent Constraint
The supposed contradiction between relativity and quantum mechanics stems from trying to quantise spacetime as if it were a thing. But if spacetime is just the structured relation of instantiation:
Gravity isn’t a force or curvature but the emergent constraint on how processes instantiate.
Quantum uncertainty and relativistic dilation are not opposing phenomena but different responses to constraint.
The Planck scale is not a bridge between two theories, but a boundary of meaningful instantiation.
6. The Deep Question: What Governs Process Instantiation?
If both relativity and quantum mechanics are surface expressions, the deeper theory asks:
What governs the structured potential from which processes instantiate?
How are these potentials constrained under different regimes?
What gives rise to the patterned, recursive actualisation of physical laws?
Instead of quantising geometry or particle interactions, we might seek the grammar of instantiation itself.
Closing Reflection: Toward a Poetics of Physics
This isn’t just a change in theory—it’s a change in imagination. If the universe is not built from objects in space, but from the instantiation of unfolding relations, then physics becomes the study of meaning made manifest. In that case, the deepest unification is not mathematical, but metaphysical: the cosmos as a grammar of becoming.
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