When Possibility Ends: Coda: Keeping Possibility Open After Relativity

This short series has not argued that physics is wrong about time, nor that relativity secretly requires a return to temporal privilege. It has argued something both more modest and more demanding: that ontological discipline must be maintained even — especially — when our most powerful theories tempt us to abandon it.

The block universe is attractive because it promises rest. Nothing further needs to happen. Nothing remains undecided. The work of actuality appears to have been completed in advance, leaving only description.

But this rest is purchased at too high a price.

Across physics, logic, and theories of meaning, the same lesson keeps reappearing: structure does not close itself. A system can constrain, organise, and articulate possibility, but it cannot exhaust it. There is always a difference between what a theory makes possible and what is actualised under a particular cut.

Relativity sharpens this lesson rather than undermining it. By denying privileged frames, it denies us the comfort of a single authoritative standpoint. What it does not give us — and cannot give us — is a completed totality that stands in for all perspectives at once.

Once this is seen, the choice becomes clearer. We can respond to the loss of privilege by reintroducing it covertly, in the form of a God’s-eye geometry. Or we can accept the harder task: to think actuality as something that must be achieved, perspectivally and locally, without ever being globally complete.

The second path is less comforting, but more faithful — not only to relativity, but to the conditions under which anything can be said to be actual at all.

What lies ahead, then, is not a defence of becoming against science, but a continued effort to articulate what becoming names: the irreducible openness of actuality, the fact that possibility is never already finished, and the ongoing work required to keep that distinction alive.

That work does not end with time.

It extends into meaning, inference, agency, and value — wherever the temptation arises to mistake a space of possibilities for a completed world.

Relativity does not close that space.

It leaves it open.