metonymy4u

Almost 500 years ago, Copernicus published a work that revolutionized the way we think about ourselves and our world. He proposed a return to an observer centric model of the cosmos, in which the position of the observer is taken into consideration. This spelled the beginning of the end of absolutist vocabularies. Still they persist even to this day. Einstein, though he relativized space and time, persisted in the belief in a Galilean absolutism, viz. that the laws of physics (written in the language of mathematics) must be the same for all observers. Indeed, it is hard to do science without such an assumption. And yet a consistent theory of everything (“quantum gravity”) still eludes us. And the possibility of a stochastic reality has led to some truly relativistic models, such as the possibilities of multiverses, or of a completely atemporal collapse of the quantum wave function. Are we perhaps finally learning to find our way back to the undetermined world, in which the possibility of science is built upon the (useful) illusion of being able to step into the same river as often as we wish?