Lawful Artefacts: 1 From Impossible Worlds to Cosmic Artefacts

In our recent series on Escher, we explored worlds that fail despite flawless local lawfulness. The endless staircases of Ascending and Descending and the multi-gravity planes of Relativity were not optical tricks; they were structurally impossible systems in which local rules are perfectly obeyed but global integration fails. Nothing goes wrong locally—yet the world does not hold.

This tension between local lawfulness and global inhabitability is not confined to art or fiction. Remarkably, it also appears in modern cosmology, in the phenomena we call dark matter and dark energy.

The Puzzle of Cosmic Artefacts

For decades, astronomers have observed puzzling discrepancies in the universe:

• Dark matter: Galaxies rotate in ways that suggest more mass than we can see.

• Dark energy: The universe’s expansion accelerates, defying expectations from known matter and energy.

Traditional accounts treat these anomalies as evidence of new, unseen substances—matter and energy we cannot detect directly. But an alternative perspective is possible: perhaps these phenomena are not “things” at all. Perhaps they are artefacts of misread relational structure.

Escher as a Metaphor for Misconstrual

Consider the Escherian insight:

• Every step on a staircase obeys its local rules.

• Gravity and orientation are respected in each frame.

• Yet the stairway loops impossibly: the global world cannot exist.

Now imagine we are cosmologists observing the universe. Each measurement is locally lawful: stars, galaxies, cosmic microwave background radiation—all obey known physics. But when we project these local patterns onto a global ontology of matter and energy, we encounter anomalies.

In other words, the “missing mass” and “accelerating expansion” may be artefacts of the assumption that our local observations integrate into a single globally coherent picture—just as the impossibility of Escher’s staircases emerges from assuming that all local frames can coexist in a single inhabitable space.

Relational Artefacts in Physics

From the standpoint of relational ontology:

• Physical phenomena are not intrinsic entities but patterns of relations.

• Observations capture local lawfulness—how objects behave relative to one another.

• When we interpret these local relations as evidence of global entities, we risk misattribution.

Dark matter and dark energy could be exactly this: artefacts arising from a misconstrual of global reality, not undiscovered substances. Just as Escher’s images are perfectly lawful locally yet impossible globally, the universe may be perfectly lawful in local measurements yet resist naive global extrapolation.

Why This Matters

This perspective is more than a cosmological curiosity. It invites us to rethink how we read lawfulness as reality, and how artefacts emerge whenever local consistency is mistaken for global existence. The lesson applies across domains:

• In art and fiction, as we have seen with Escher.

• In physics, as we now suggest with cosmic phenomena.

• In complex systems more broadly—bureaucracies, AI, data networks—where anomalies can be artefacts of relational misreading.

Conclusion

The journey from Escher to cosmology begins with a simple but profound insight: what looks real globally may be an artefact of perfectly lawful local relations. Dark matter and dark energy, like Escher’s staircases, remind us that lawfulness does not guarantee worldhood.

In the next post, we will explore these cosmic anomalies in more detail, showing how relational misreading might produce the phenomena we attribute to dark matter and dark energy—and how this approach preserves all observed local lawfulness while dissolving the need for invisible entities