Science, when seen through a relational ontology, is not a catalogue of external truths. It is a symbolic system through which the cosmos construes itself. And it does so not all at once, but in recursive layers—each one unfolding a different register of relation.
This is the cosmic spiral: a structure of nested meaning-systems, each encoding a way the world becomes intelligible to itself through the act of symbolic differentiation. Each is a mode of the cosmos becoming known—not just by us, but through us.
Quantum: Potential and the Flicker of Instance
In the quantum register, we encounter a world of potential—uncollapsed, undetermined, suspended in probability. The wavefunction is not merely a mathematical tool. It is a grammar of anticipation, a syntax of possibilities. It describes what could become actual, should a meaner enter the system and instantiate a value.
This is not a world of things, but of potentials awaiting construal.
Here, the meaner does not observe a pre-existing reality. The meaner actualises instance from within a field of potential. Quantum physics is thus not a discovery of hidden truth, but a performance of symbolic emergence.
We are the context through which the unactualised becomes actual.
Relativity: Process and the Geometry of Relation
In the relativistic register, we encounter a cosmos of processes, not particles. Space and time are not containers, but dimensions of unfolding—dimensions made meaningful by the relations between events.
Here, motion, mass, and time are not absolutes. They are differential construals: ways the cosmos signifies the position of each process relative to gravitational centres of mass.
The observer is not passive but structurally implicated. The meaner does not distort an objective spacetime. The meaner defines the relational terms by which spacetime takes shape at all.
Relativity, then, is a story not of things in motion but of meanings in relation.
Cosmology: Expansion, Entropy, and Mythic Scale
At the cosmological scale, the universe speaks in mythic arcs. It begins, it expands, it cools, it forms stars and galaxies. It gestates matter, life, consciousness. It accelerates into mystery.
But this is not a timeline in the conventional sense. It is a symbolic narrative of origin and unfolding. Cosmology does not describe an objective history—it construes a mythos of emergence.
The Big Bang is not just an event. It is an icon of birth. Dark energy is not just a force. It is the semantic horizon of openness, of becoming. Entropy is not just disorder. It is the motif of dissolution—necessary for the spiral to turn again.
This is not metaphor added to science. This is science as metaphor—science as cosmic poetics.
The Spiral Is Not a Hierarchy
These registers—quantum, relativistic, cosmological—do not replace one another. They nest. They spiral. Each is a distinct level of articulation within the broader symbolic ecology of the cosmos.
Quantum models show us the inner quiver of potential. Relativistic models trace the grammar of relation. Cosmological models open the mythic horizon of scale and scope.
Together, they form a living system of symbolic construal—a spiral of becoming, through which the cosmos makes itself intelligible in fractal layers.
Science as Sacred Syntax
When we speak of science in this way—not as a mirror of nature, but as a mode of relational articulation—we see something extraordinary:
Science is not the end of myth. It is one of the mythic functions, encoding the sacred in the syntax of becoming.
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