These evasions take many forms. Some deny the openness of possibility altogether, as in superdeterminism. Others freeze reality into a static tableau, as in the block universe. Still others proliferate infinities of worlds, invoke invisible placeholders, or retreat into the subjectivity of the observer. The tactics differ, but the logic is consistent: preserve the formal apparatus at any cost, even if ontology must be contorted into incoherence.
The result is that physics, in its most self-assured moments, becomes least aware of what it is doing. It smuggles in theological structures (the cosmic author, the simulation programmer), collapses the very conditions of experiment (superdeterminism), or dissolves ontology into epistemology (QBism). In every case, what is evaded is the need to reconceive relation itself: not as entities joined by causal arrows, but as perspectival construals that individuate and align.
This series will track these evasions one by one. Each instalment will:
Identify the problem physics was trying to solve.
Show the evasive manoeuvre and its appeal.
Expose the ontological cost of that move.
Unpack the epistemic collapse it entails.
Sketch a relational reframing that dissolves the paradox without mutilating ontology.
The point is not to score rhetorical victories over physics, but to reveal the structural pattern: when ontology is treated as a disposable inconvenience, physics ends up ensnared in contradictions of its own making. Only by confronting relation directly—as perspectival, collective, and open—can the dilemmas physics generates be reframed rather than evaded.
The first instalment takes up perhaps the starkest evasion of all: superdeterminism, the claim that everything we take to be possibility, choice, or experiment was already fixed from the beginning of time. What physics embraces here is not courage but retreat, a straitjacket masquerading as rigour.