Limits, self-reference, and the myth physics cannot avoid
The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.— Werner Heisenberg
By the time modern physics has given up description and learned to live with phenomena as relational events, it has already crossed into dangerous territory. The danger is not technical. It is conceptual.
Physics now finds itself confronting a problem it cannot treat as just another complication of method. The problem is meaning.
This is the point at which many readers become uneasy. “Meaning” sounds psychological, cultural, even spiritual—everything physics is trained to exclude. But the unease is itself diagnostic. Meaning has been smuggled into physics all along, not as a topic, but as a condition.
Once that condition becomes visible, it can no longer be ignored.
The limit of articulation
Heisenberg’s remark is often heard as a lament, as though reality were somehow slipping through our fingers:
The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.
But nothing has been lost. What has been exposed is a limit. Articulation does not fail because it is inaccurate; it fails because it is articulation. Words, equations, and concepts do not exhaust reality. They carve it.
Physics encounters this limit whenever it attempts to totalise its own account—whenever it tries to say not just something about the world, but everything. At that point, articulation folds back on itself, and paradox appears.
This is not a special problem of quantum mechanics. It is a structural feature of any system that tries to include its own conditions of intelligibility within its description.
Reality under self-reference
Niels Bohr states the consequence with unsettling clarity:
Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.
The statement sounds cryptic until its target becomes clear. “Real,” here, is not a metaphysical substance. It is a status conferred within a framework of articulation. What counts as real in physics is what can be stabilised as a phenomenon under controlled conditions.
But the constituents of those phenomena—the conditions, distinctions, and cuts that make them possible—cannot themselves appear as phenomena of the same kind. To ask for that is to demand that a system step outside itself.
Bohr’s more playful formulation makes the same point:
A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.
This is not cosmic poetry. It is an acknowledgement of radical immanence. There is no external standpoint from which the world can be described in full. Every account is made from within the world it accounts for.
When physics turns mythic
John Archibald Wheeler felt this pressure keenly, and he did not shy away from its implications:
The universe gives birth to consciousness, and consciousness gives meaning to the universe.
This sentence is often dismissed as mysticism, but it is better understood as a symptom. Wheeler is reaching for a way to speak about self-reference without the tools to do so rigorously.
Physics can explain how complex systems arise. It can even explain how observers emerge. What it cannot explain, using its own resources alone, is how meaning arises without either reducing it to mechanism or inflating it into cosmic purpose.
At this boundary, physics begins to generate myths—not because it has abandoned rigor, but because rigor has carried it to the edge of what it can say.
Meaning is not consciousness
The most common mistake at this point is to identify meaning with consciousness. This mistake is understandable. Consciousness is where meaning is most vivid in everyday life. But conflating the two solves nothing.
Meaning does not enter physics because human minds are special. It enters because articulation, observation, and phenomenon-formation already presuppose intelligibility. Something must count as something for physics to get started at all.
That “as” is the mark of meaning. It is not psychological. It is structural.
Once this is recognised, the problem sharpens. Physics depends on meaning to function, but it cannot ground meaning without stepping beyond its own explanatory frame. Meaning is both indispensable and untheorisable from within.
The unavoidable threshold
This is the threshold at which physics hesitates. It can retreat, treating meaning as someone else’s problem. Or it can gesture vaguely toward consciousness, information, or participation, hoping one of these will carry the load.
Neither move resolves the tension. The first denies the conditions of physics’ own success. The second obscures them.
What physics requires—but does not yet possess—is a way of thinking about meaning that:
does not collapse it into value or consciousness,
does not turn it into a metaphysical substance,
and does not pretend it can be eliminated.
Until such an account is available, physics will continue to circle this limit, generating insights it cannot fully articulate.
Where this leaves us
Taken together, the arc of modern physics tells a coherent story. Description collapses. Phenomena are born as relational events. Meaning emerges as an unavoidable condition—and an unresolved problem.
This is not a failure of physics. It is the sign of its maturity.
The task that remains is not to add meaning to physics, but to clarify the kind of thing meaning already is, and the role it plays in making phenomena possible at all.
That task does not belong to physics alone. But neither can physics escape it.
The encounter has already occurred. What comes next depends on whether we are willing to take it seriously.
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