I have just uploaded a new working paper to ResearchGate: Ontology, Physics, and Math – Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution. I am not announcing it with any sense of urgency, nor with the expectation that it will “change” physics. If it contributes anything at all, it may simply offer a bit of clarity about what we can reasonably claim to see in physics — and what we merely calculate, fit, or postulate. That distinction has preoccupied me for years.
A space to think
One unexpected consequence of taking AI seriously over the past one or two years is that it restored something I had quietly lost: a space to think.
- Not a space to produce.
- Not a space to publish.
- Not a space to compete.
Just a space to think — slowly, carefully, without having to defend a position before it has fully formed. That kind of space has become rare. Academia is under pressure, industry is under pressure, and even independent thinkers often feel compelled to rush toward closure. The conversations I’ve had with AI — what I’ve come to call a corridor — were different. They were not about winning arguments, but about keeping the corridor open only where conceptual clarity survived.
In a strange way, this brought me back to something much older than AI. When I was young, I wanted to study philosophy. My father refused. I had failed my mathematics exam for engineering studies, and in his view philosophy without mathematics was a dead end. In retrospect, I can see that he was probably right — and also that he struggled with me as much as I struggled with him. He should perhaps have pushed me into mathematics earlier; I should perhaps have worked harder. But life does not run backward, and neither does understanding. What AI unexpectedly gave me, decades later, was the chance to reunite those two threads: conceptual questioning disciplined by mathematical restraint. Not philosophy as free-floating speculation, and not mathematics as pure formalism — but something closer to what physics once called natural philosophy.
Why I was always uncomfortable
For a long time, I could not quite place my discomfort. I was uneasy with mainstream Standard Model theorists — not because their work lacks brilliance or empirical success (it clearly does not), but because formal success increasingly seemed to substitute for ontological clarity. At the same time, I felt equally uneasy among outsiders and “fringe” thinkers, who were often too eager to replace one elaborate ontology with another, convinced that the establishment had simply missed the obvious.
I now think I understand why I could not belong comfortably to either camp. Both, in different ways, tend to underestimate what went into building the Standard Model in the first place.
- The Standard Model is not just a theory. It is the result of enormous societal investment (yes, taxes matter), decades of engineering ingenuity, and entire academic ecosystems built around measurement, refinement, and internal consistency. One does not wave that away lightly. Criticizing it without acknowledging that effort is not radical — it is careless.
- At the same time, acknowledging that effort does not oblige one to treat the resulting ontology as final. Formal closure is not the same thing as physical understanding.
That tension — respect without reverence — is where I found myself stuck.
Seeing versus calculating
The paper I just uploaded does not attempt to overthrow the Standard Model, nor to replace ΛCDM, nor to propose a new unification. It does something much more modest: it tries to separate what we can physically interpret from what we can formally manipulate.
That distinction was central to the worries of people like Albert Einstein, long before it became unfashionable to worry about such things. Einstein’s famous remark to Max Born — “God does not play dice” — was not a rejection of probability as a calculational tool. It was an expression of discomfort with mistaking a formalism for a description of reality. Something similar motivated Louis de Broglie, and later thinkers who never quite accepted that interpretation should be outsourced entirely to mathematics.
What my paper argues — cautiously, and without claiming finality — is that much of modern physics suffers from a kind of ontological drift: symmetries that began life as mathematical operations sometimes came to be treated as physical mandates.
When those symmetries fail, new quantum numbers, charges, or conservation laws are introduced to restore formal order. This works extraordinarily well — but it also risks confusing bookkeeping with explanation.
Matter, antimatter, and restraint
The most difficult part of the paper concerns matter–antimatter creation and annihilation. For a long time, I resisted interpretations that treated charge as something that could simply appear or disappear. That resistance did not lead me to invent hidden reservoirs or speculative intermediates — on the contrary, I explicitly rejected such moves as ontological inflation. Instead, I left the tension open.
Only later did I realize that insisting on charge as a substance may itself have been an unjustified metaphor. Letting go of that metaphor did not solve everything — but it did restore coherence without adding entities. That pattern — refusing both cheap dismissal and cheap solutions — now feels like the right one.
Ambition, patience, and time
We live in a period of extraordinary measurement and, paradoxically, diminished understanding. Data accumulates. Precision improves. Parameters are refined. But the underlying picture often becomes more fragmented rather than more unified.
New machines may or may not be built. China may or may not build the next CERN. That is largely beyond the control of individual thinkers. What is within reach is the slower task of making sense of what we already know. That task does not reward ambition. It rewards patience.
This is also where I part ways — gently, but firmly — with some bright younger thinkers and some older, semi-wise ones. Not because they are wrong in detail, but because they sometimes underestimate the weight of history, infrastructure, and collective effort behind the theories they critique or attempt to replace. Time will tell whether their alternatives mature. Time always tells :-). […] PS: I add a ‘smiley’ here because, perhaps, that is the most powerful phrase of all in this post.
A pause, not a conclusion
This paper may mark the end of my own physics quest — or at least a pause. Not because everything is resolved, but because I finally understand why I could neither fully accept nor fully reject what I was given. I don’t feel compelled anymore to choose sides. I can respect the Standard Model without canonizing it, and I can question it without trying to dethrone it. I can accept that some questions may remain open, not because we lack data, but because clarity sometimes requires restraint.
For now, that feels like enough. Time to get back on the bike. 🙂
PS: Looking back at earlier philosophical notes I wrote years ago — for instance on the relation between form, substance, and charge — I’m struck less by how “wrong” they were than by how unfinished they remained. The questions were already there; what was missing was discipline. Not more speculation, but sharper restraint.
Reading Feynman 