A Different Approach to Physics

Article 2 in the series: In Search of the Foundations of Reality

A New Perspective on Reality and Its Underlying Unity

Disclaimer

The ideas presented in this series of articles are speculative and have not been experimentally confirmed. They are intended as a philosophical and ontological exploration of possible underlying structures of physical reality, rather than as a replacement for experimentally verified physics.

Why Does Reality Exist?

Modern physics is extraordinarily successful — yet not fully explanatory. Theories such as relativity and quantum mechanics describe reality with remarkable precision and have been extensively confirmed through experiment. Nevertheless, beneath these successful descriptions remain deeper questions concerning the origin of the structures upon which they are based. Moreover, the relationships between the various domains of physics are not yet fully understood, and a single conceptual foundation that unifies these domains remains elusive.

We describe fields, particles and forces, yet rarely ask what the minimal conditions are under which such descriptions become possible in the first place. Why is there a dynamic structure that can be described as a field? Why do states, transitions and regularities exist? And ultimately: why does anything exist at all?

These were the questions that originally led me to study physics. During my studies in Delft, however, such fundamental questions received relatively little attention. Looking back, Leiden University, with its stronger tradition in theoretical and foundational physics, might have been more closely aligned with my interests. Nevertheless, I deliberately chose Delft because, alongside theoretical questions, I also wanted a practical education that would allow me to build a career in the real world.

My studies were completed, a career in business and information technology followed, and physics gradually faded into the background. Yet the questions never disappeared. I continued reading, continued wondering, and continued to feel that beneath everything we describe there must exist a simpler and more fundamental point of departure.

My central question about reality is not how reality behaves, but why a physical reality capable of behaving exists at all. How did such a reality come into being? From what, through what, or under what conditions did it emerge?

In modern physics, increasing emphasis has been placed on the mathematical description of phenomena. This mathematical approach has proven extraordinarily powerful and has led to predictions of unprecedented accuracy. Yet it also raises a fundamental question: does mathematics describe reality itself, or does it describe patterns and relationships within an underlying reality that is not yet conceptually fully understood?

Precisely because mathematics is so successful, it is worth asking why these descriptions work so well and to what extent they reflect reality itself, rather than constituting highly successful models of it. From my perspective, mathematics may not be the foundation of physics, but rather the formal language through which physical relationships can be expressed once they have been conceptually defined.

This raises the possibility that beneath our current mathematical structures there may exist simpler and more fundamental dynamical principles that must first be understood conceptually before they can be formalised mathematically.

An Alternative Interpretation of Physics

My approach to physics has been shaped in part by decades of experience in information technology and systems architecture. Just as complex software systems emerge from simple underlying layers of instructions and processes, physical reality itself may perhaps be understood as a hierarchy of emergent dynamical structures.

The articles that follow originate from a renewed engagement with the fundamental questions that first drew me to physics, combined with the perspective gained through a lifetime of work in computing and systems design. The investigation begins with a simple question: is it possible to define a basic structure that is necessary before physical description itself can acquire meaning? In a sense, it is a search for the most elementary building blocks of physical significance.

These articles do not claim to replace or correct established physics. Quite the contrary. Theories such as quantum field theory and quantum mechanics describe physical reality with extraordinary precision and predictive power. This strongly suggests that their mathematical frameworks provide highly effective descriptions of the world.

The purpose of these essays is different. They explore whether the formal structures of modern physics — fields, particles and their interactions — might themselves be understood as emergent descriptions arising from a more minimal underlying dynamical structure.

The central idea is that objects and particles may not be fundamentally primary. Instead, underlying dynamical relationships and coherence structures may constitute the deeper level from which familiar physical phenomena emerge.

The objective is therefore not to introduce new physics, but to investigate whether existing physical descriptions can be conceptually traced back to simpler underlying principles. In doing so, the broader aim is to explore whether a deeper coherence may exist between the different domains of physics, ranging from elementary particles and quantum mechanics to cosmology and questions such as dark energy.