Worlds After Meaning: 4 Physics as One World-Making Practice

Physics has long occupied a privileged position in our understanding of reality. It is often treated as the discipline that tells us how the world really is, beneath appearances, interpretations, and perspectives. Other domains may offer partial views, but physics is assumed to speak from closer to the foundations.

This post argues for a different framing. Physics is not the final arbiter of reality. It is one highly disciplined practice of world-making, distinguished not by its access to the world itself, but by the severity and precision of its constraints.

What physics does

Physics does not begin with the world in its fullness. It begins with carefully engineered situations: experimental setups, instruments, formalisms, and protocols. These are not neutral windows onto reality. They are cuts — configurations that sharply limit what can count as a phenomenon.

Within these cuts, physics achieves extraordinary stability. Measurements repeat. Predictions hold. Phenomena behave lawfully. This success is often taken as evidence that physics has stripped away perspective.

What it has actually done is enforce it.

Measurement as cut

A measurement is not a passive reading of a pre-existing property. It is an act that establishes which distinctions matter and which do not. To measure is to constrain a system so tightly that only certain outcomes can appear.

Once this is recognised, the mystery surrounding measurement dissolves. There is no need to ask how an observer intrudes upon an otherwise complete world. The measurement is the world-making event. It actualises a particular slice of possibility as determinate.

Different measurement practices enact different physical worlds, even when they target what is nominally the same system.

Formalism and possibility

The mathematical formalisms of physics do not describe reality in general. They articulate spaces of constrained possibility. A formalism specifies what can vary, what must remain invariant, and how transitions are permitted.

This is why multiple formalisms can coexist, overlap, or even compete while remaining empirically successful. Each imposes a different cut on possibility, yielding a different but coordinated physical world.

There is no uniquely forced formalism because there is no system-independent world demanding a single description.

Objectivity without foundations

Physics exemplifies objectivity not by transcending perspective, but by disciplining it. Its claims are objective because the constraints that sustain them are explicit, repeatable, and externally enforced through instruments and practices.

This objectivity is real — but it is local. It holds within the world that physics enacts. To extend it beyond those constraints is not realism; it is overreach.

Recognising this does not weaken physics. It clarifies its power.

Physics among worlds

When physics is treated as one world-making practice among others, longstanding tensions dissolve. Biology no longer needs to be reduced to physics to be legitimate. Human experience no longer needs to be dismissed as merely subjective. These domains enact different worlds under different constraints.

Where their worlds align, coordination is possible. Where they do not, no amount of insistence will force convergence.

What follows

If physics is not foundational but exemplary, then the task is to examine other systems that make worlds in different ways. The next instalment turns to living systems, asking how worlds are enacted not through measurement and formalism, but through viability and action.

Physics does not tell us what the world is.

It shows us how a world can be made to hold.