1. From Diagnosis to Practice
If singularities are failures of readiness rather than revelations of metaphysical extremity, then the question shifts decisively. The problem is no longer what exists at the singularity, but how modelling practice allowed readiness to be presupposed beyond its point of validity.
This final post turns from diagnosis to discipline. What would it mean for physics to treat readiness—not as a hidden assumption—but as an explicit modelling constraint?
2. Readiness as Constraint, Not Claim
The crucial move is modest but far-reaching:
Readiness is not a fact about the world; it is a condition of modelling.
Inclination is encoded formally. Ability is not.
To check readiness is therefore not to speculate about unseen ontology, but to ask whether the relational conditions required for further actualisation still obtain within a given construal.
This reframes the role of theory:
not as an engine that must always run,
but as a practice accountable to its own horizon of applicability.
3. Horizon Exhaustion as a Legitimate Stopping Condition
In current physics culture, stopping is treated as failure. If equations cease to deliver determinate results, the response is almost always to push harder:
extend the model,
quantise the field,
add structure,
extrapolate deeper.
Relational ontology legitimises a different response:
Horizon exhaustion is not ignorance; it is information.
When potential space collapses, the responsible move is not further extrapolation, but acknowledgement that the current construal has reached its limit.
This does not end inquiry. It ends this way of inquiring.
4. Shifts of Construal, Not Deeper Penetration
Checking readiness reorients scientific progress.
Instead of asking:
How do we push the model further?
we ask:
What shift of construal is now required?
This may involve:
changing scale,
changing descriptive resources,
changing what counts as a phenomenon,
or changing the role of the observer within the model.
Progress becomes lateral and reflexive, not vertical and accumulative.
5. Familiar Practices, Newly Understood
Seen in this light, several well-known practices in physics appear less mysterious—and less metaphysical.
Renormalisation can be read as an implicit management of readiness: a way of re-stabilising inclination when naïve extrapolation outruns ability.
Gauge freedom reflects under-specification rather than surplus structure: multiple formal paths remain available where readiness does not yet constrain choice.
Collapse problems arise when inclination toward linear evolution persists beyond the readiness conditions that sustain it.
These are not anomalies demanding interpretation. They are signals that readiness is being negotiated tacitly rather than thematised explicitly.
6. Singularities Revisited
Within this practice, singularities lose their metaphysical charge.
They are not:
edges of reality,
windows onto infinity,
or sites of ontological rupture.
They are:
moments where a modelling practice must take responsibility for its own assumptions.
A singularity says: this construal no longer has the readiness it presupposes.
7. Objectivity Reframed
This does not weaken objectivity; it refines it.
Objectivity is not achieved by erasing perspective, but by making the conditions of construal accountable.
A model that checks readiness is more objective, not less—because it knows when it can no longer speak without distortion.
8. Closing the Series
This mini-series has argued for a simple but consequential shift:
from treating singularities as ontological facts,
to recognising them as relational diagnostics.
When readiness is respected:
infinity loses its mystique,
breakdown loses its drama,
and modelling regains its discipline.
Singularities do not tell us where the world ends.
They tell us where a way of making sense must change.
That is not a failure of science.
It is science remembering what it is: a relational, semiotic practice accountable to the horizons it inhabits.