🌌 Beyond Curvature: Rethinking Gravity through Relational Ontology
The familiar metaphor of spacetime curvature has long served as the conceptual scaffolding for general relativity. In this metaphor, space is treated as a pliable surface — a “fabric” that bends, stretches, and contracts in response to mass and energy. This imagery, while pedagogically effective, rests on assumptions foreign to a relational ontology. It implies that space exists independently of the processes it relates, and that it can be curved or compressed relative to some neutral background — a metaphysical vestige of absolute space.
But what if space is not a substance, nor even a surface? What if it is not that which is curved, but rather that which emerges from relation?
From a relational ontological perspective, space is not a container; it is a configuration of co-instantiability — the patterned topology of how unfolding processes relate to one another. Similarly, time is not a ticking backdrop, but the dimension of the unfolding itself. In this frame, we no longer ask what space is doing (expanding, contracting, curving), but rather: how is relational constraint being instantiated in a given field of interaction?
This shift renders the notion of “gravitational contraction” conceptually problematic. In a relational ontology:
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There is no absolute geometry for space to contract relative to.
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There is no background canvas against which local “curvature” can be measured.
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There is no spatial substance to be squeezed.
What physics construes as “curvature” near a massive object is more accurately understood as a tightening of relational topology — a shift in the field of possible co-instantiations. That is, in denser gravitational fields, processes cannot unfold with the same degrees of relational freedom as they can in less constrained fields. Their spacings, durations, and synchronisations alter — not because a thing called space is being warped, but because the unfolding of relation itself is differentiating under constraint.
In this view, “contraction” is not a physical phenomenon, but a semiotic construal of relational proximity. It is how physicists instantiate meaning from observed patterns, using a framework that still presumes an underlying spatial substrate.
Just as the relational ontology dispenses with the need for dark energy by dissolving the illusion of expansion “relative to itself,” it also shows that gravitational curvature is not a deformation of space, but an expression of how co-unfolding processes constrain one another.
📏 When the Ruler Forgets Itself: Measurement and the Misconstrual of Relation
In physics, measurement is often treated as neutral — a passive observer of a system, revealing objective quantities. Length, time, mass, and velocity are presumed to be intrinsic properties of entities or configurations in space and time, measurable in isolation from the act of measuring.
But in a relational ontology, this neutrality dissolves.
Measurement is itself an instance of relation. It does not reveal pre-existing absolutes but instead construes a field of potential through the lens of a specific relational configuration. Every measurement brings with it a perspective, a protocol, a normative scale, and a symbolic system. It is not outside the system — it is within it, participating in it, shaping what is taken to be real.
This has profound implications.
🧠 The Illusion of Invariant Quantities
When we measure the distance between two galaxies and find it increasing, we infer “expansion.” But expansion relative to what?
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Not to a cosmic grid — for in the relational view, there is none.
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Not to the standard of a meter stick — because that stick is itself a product of processes unfolding within the same relational field.
To say “the universe is expanding” because two systems are moving apart is to mistake a change in relation for a property of space. But relation has no absolute frame. It only ever appears from within the unfolding system.
So too with time dilation in gravitational fields: we observe clocks ticking differently depending on proximity to mass. From this, we infer that “time flows more slowly” in stronger gravitational fields. But this assumes time exists as a flow, and that the clock is reporting on it, rather than instantiating it.
Clocks do not measure time.They instantiate a temporality — a constrained unfolding — that we interpret as “time.”
🔍 Measurement as Construal
In relational terms:
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Measurement is not revelation; it is symbolic construal.
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It is not discovery; it is disciplined participation in a field of meaning.
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It is not objective report; it is systemic enactment of potential into instance.
This is not to say that measurement is wrong. Quite the opposite: it is necessary. But its results must be understood as co-instantiations of the system that measures and the system measured, not as access to a noumenal layer beneath the relational web.
🪞The Deeper Error
The deeper error lies not in measuring, but in forgetting that the measuring system is not external. The ruler stretches with the fabric; the clock ticks within the flow it helps generate. To then interpret these results as though they report on an independent reality is to sever process from participation — to treat relation as substance, and perspective as objectivity.
Measurement misconstrues relation when it forgets that it is relation.
✨ A New Ethic of Measurement
From the perspective of relational ontology, we must recover a more reflexive, participatory understanding of measurement:
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Not as observation from nowhere, but as construal from within.
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Not as the uncovering of fixed quantities, but as the instantiation of patterned meaning.
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Not as objective mapping of the real, but as relational unfolding of intelligibility.
In this light, the cosmos is not composed of things with properties, but of unfolding configurations whose patterns of mutual constraint can be disciplined into insight — but never fully removed from the act of construal.
From Marks and Ticks to Relations Unfolding: A Personal Reflection
When I first began to rethink gravity and relativity through a relational lens, my mental image was something familiar and concrete: the marks on rulers growing closer together under gravity, and the ticks of clocks spreading further apart. It felt intuitive — a way to picture time dilation and spatial contraction as real, physical changes in measuring devices.This image was a helpful stepping stone. It anchored abstract concepts in tangible experience, echoing how we learn and interpret through metaphor and analogy.
Yet as the relational ontology took shape, it became clear that this intuition, while not wrong, was incomplete. The marks on rulers and clock ticks do not themselves move or change independently — rather, they are manifestations of relations unfolding differently in different fields of potential and instance.
This means we must move beyond thinking of rulers and clocks as fixed “things” subject to bending or stretching, and instead see them as processes co-instantiating the very space and time they measure.
In linguistic terms, it’s a shift akin to moving from treating words as fixed labels to understanding meaning as a dynamic interplay of systemic potentials instantiated in text. Just as grammar distinguishes between the process of meaning-making and the participants within it, relational physics distinguishes between the unfolding relations and the apparent “objects” we construe.
Reflecting on this journey underscores the power of metaphor and intuition in grappling with complex ideas — and how a conceptual leap towards relationality transforms those metaphors from static images into living processes.
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