The Fortress of Misunderstanding Physics

There have been no fundamental advances in our understanding of physics in nearly a century, despite decades of effort and billions of dollars poured into promising hypotheses such as string theory, holographic dualities (like AdS/CFT), M-theory, and loop quantum gravity. In a recent Atlantic article, Adam Riess — one of the principal discoverers of dark energy — expressed misgivings about the standard cosmological model, joining a growing number who suspect it is fundamentally incomplete or simply wrong. Even the American Physical Society now lists the foundations of quantum mechanics as a priority for its journals — a stark turn after a century of operationalism under the dominant Copenhagen view, which held that the potential reality of particles prior to measurement lay outside the realm of physical interest.

Yet despite these signs of restlessness, fundamental misunderstandings in physics remain heavily fortified. They are guarded by a culture that resists deep reflection, rigorous logical analysis, the reassessment of evidence in light of expanding observations, and any probing of the basic principles or overall coherence of the narratives we’ve taken to explain the world.

These fortifications are not the work of a single doctrine but a triangulated defence. Each arm covers the others when attacked:

• Challenge the bad metaphysics that pervades speculative, ad hoc approaches to fundamental physics, and you are met with a shallow empiricism — one that prizes incremental accuracy as the only relevant standard while giving incoherence free rein. False conclusions born of bad logic then become scaffolding for further metaphysical flights, and the resulting excitement entrenches the very errors on which it is based.
• Engage the logic directly, and you slam into barricades built from those same metaphysical speculations — or are deflected by the operationalist “shut up and calculate!” mantra.
• Raise the epistemological lesson of history — that the greatest barrier to progress has been the tendency to mistake superficial appearances for reality — and defenders retreat behind empirical success, institutional authority, or consensus, all invoked to shield incoherent metaphysics from scrutiny.

The Fortress of Misunderstanding Physics is well-guarded because its defenders have been successful for generations. They have crushed small disturbances before they could grow into genuine confrontations, promoted those content to live within consensus narratives into positions of power, and lived so long in this fortified peace that even those who sense “something is not right” cannot see how deep the misunderstanding may run.

Philosophers, whose task should have been to dismantle these defences, have largely stood idle — or worse, reinforced the ranks, promoting incoherent metaphysics, flawed logic, and empirically falsified epistemological principles.

And so the fortress stands, its three arms of defence ready to reinforce one another and repel any who approach.

Part of what makes the problem difficult is that our physical theories work well by ordinary standards. They describe things accurately and lead to intriguing possibilities worth exploring. And under normal circumstances, ad hoc metaphysical speculation steeped in an existing framework can even help refine predictions or inspire new insights.

But such approaches cannot repair a bad foundation or even identify when something is fundamentally wrong. They serve to reinforce the current narrative, or to reveal inconsistencies they cannot resolve, patching them over rather than confronting them.

When we do find, however, that something may be fundamentally off, our theories require a deeper audit. We must identify where we are doing bad metaphysics on the basis of false principles, interrogate our commitments through an epistemological lens that is alive to historical lessons, and reassess the logical architecture of our theories in light of current evidence. Only then can we know whether our philosophical commitments remain valid or whether we have chosen wrong paths on the basis of incomplete information or faulty reasoning.

By taking a three-pronged approach — auditing the philosophical, epistemological, and logical-empirical foundations of modern relativistic space-time theory — and grounding that audit in three foundational essays that examined each strand in depth, the present essay synthesises their conclusions and implications to argue for a radically different interpretation of space-time and relativity. This interpretation is metaphysically coherent, anchored in epistemic principles with a proven historical record, and more closely aligned with modern empirical evidence than the prevailing Einsteinian framework.

These three branches together form a complete and rigorous audit:

• The philosophical branch addresses metaphysics, ontology, conceptual clarity, and coherence — asking what sort of thing the theory is actually saying exists.
• The epistemological branch examines how we come to know what we know, what counts as evidence, the historical precedents for paradigm shifts, and the criteria by which theories are chosen or abandoned.
• The logical-empirical branch tests the internal consistency of the theory, the validity of its reasoning, and its fit with current data — the point where formal reasoning meets observation.

Together, they cover:

1. What the theory means (philosophical)
2. Whether the way we arrived at and justify it is sound (epistemological)
3. Whether its reasoning and data hold up (logical-empirical)

This is the full set of weaponry any serious inquiry into the foundations of physics should demand — one designed not merely to describe the world more precisely, but to determine whether the structure of our explanation itself is fundamentally right.

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Framing the parallel: geocentrism vs heliocentrism as a lens through which to view frame-relative simultaneity vs objective simultaneity.

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There is a lot we can learn from history, and the history of astronomy in particular provides an invaluable playbook for how science functions — and for what it takes to correct an apparently realistic, thoroughly reasoned, empirically accurate, and completely wrong paradigm.

This history teaches the basic logic of the scientific method: the absence of final proof; the narrow scope in which science can reveal the nature of reality; the need for humility; the importance of empirical data and its potential to mislead if taken too literally; the difference between verified principles and observed facts — and the wide chasm between them; the role of falsification; the demand for objectivity; and the necessity of reevaluating what justifies our beliefs when new evidence or clearer reasoning comes to light. 

Most of all, it shows the importance of accepting that there are always other ways of explaining the facts. The explanation we currently think is fundamentally right isn’t necessarily the right one — which is why we must clearly understand the evidence that supports our beliefs, objectively question the validity of common interpretations, and be prepared to revise those interpretations when warranted.

The question of whether our world is geocentric or heliocentric shows this most vividly: phenomena are not always faithful representations of reality. Perspectival illusions are a fact of physical reality, and science must learn to sort them out. 

While a natural starting point is to link apparent phenomena directly to reality, we must always remain open to the possibility that this assumption is wrong — that there exists an alternative explanation in which the phenomena naturally emerge from perspective rather than because reality is faithfully represented in our observations.

We now know that the apparent daily concentric motion of the stars is due to Earth’s rotation, not the real motion of the heavens; that the Sun’s apparent yearly path along the ecliptic is due to Earth’s orbit, not the Sun’s; and that the apparent retrograde motion of the outer planets is due to parallax shifts when we overtake them in our own orbit, not because their own motion actually reverses course. But there are also phenomena that are direct representations: the Moon’s monthly circuit around the sky is because it truly orbits the Earth; its change in size is because it genuinely moves nearer or farther away, following its elliptical path; and Mercury and Venus really are moving backwards in their orbits when we see their westward motion from Earth.

The point is that either one may be true in any given case — and both kinds of examples are found in our current understanding. Therefore, science should never assume that every apparent phenomenon is a literal reflection of reality. To ignore the possibility that some observations are perspectival illusions is to risk mistaking appearance for truth. That is a correction we must always be prepared to make.

Yet for more than a century relativists have done precisely what history tells us never to do: they have argued that since local experiments cannot distinguish an absolute state of rest, and in keeping with the principle of relativity any rest-frame does function to provide an operational description of occurrences in one’s surroundings, the most objective definitions of “rest” and of “simultaneity” are those that describe observers who are relatively at rest in any frame as really being “at rest,” tying “simultaneity” directly to relatively synchronous events — a move directly parallel e.g. to treating the Sun’s annual path as its real orbit — an explanation that matches appearances locally but collapses under broader coherence and deeper evidence. These direct correspondences, of “the only physically meaningful definition of rest” with “frame-relative rest” — and of “simultaneity” with “frame-relative synchrony” — are exactly the sort of trivial, one-to-one metaphysical mappings between reality and phenomena that historical cases like the daily rotation of the celestial sphere, the Sun’s annual orbit around the ecliptic, and the retrograde motions of the outer planets, warn against.

But what other tools do we have to guide us if we wish to interrogate whether reality is or is not trivially linked to frame-relative appearances? 

The relativity of inertia and the relativity of synchrony explicitly imply that if there is an ontological simultaneity that differs from frame-relative synchrony, it could not be observed in any local experimental setup. Such experiments therefore will not help. 

This is also not a problem of empirical accuracy: the physical, mathematical description does not change whether there is an ontological simultaneity definition or not. 

But these things don’t mean such a definition is a “merely academic” matter, as there may be indirect, yet still significantly related logical consequences that depend on identifying a truly accurate simultaneity convention. While this does not seem to affect local physics, that does not mean it’s insignificant to all physics. History has shown repeatedly that the inability to measure a thing locally is not proof it does not exist — nor that its effects cannot be revealed by other means. 

The fact that local experiments can only reveal frame-relative synchrony, not any deeper simultaneity, therefore does not ensure that a universal, ontological simultaneity must remain unobservable in all contexts.

Now, as I’ve previously explained, we actually have since found clear evidence of an objective, cosmological state of rest that has persisted, remaining consistently well-defined, throughout its observable history. 

But setting that aside momentarily, let us first consider whether there are any other epistemic tools at our disposal, learned the hard way through the history of astronomy, which could have helped settle this matter prior to precision CMB measurements. As I’ve explained, from an epistemic standpoint, the precise isotropy of the CMB redshift — with its confirmation of uniform expansion, a universal state of rest, and cosmic simultaneity that has persisted throughout the entire history of the observable universe — plays the same role that stellar parallax did for heliocentrism: direct evidence that one model is correct and the rival has no clear explanation for the observation. The direct evidence of a cosmic rest frame and our absolute motion through the universe is similarly concrete evidence that there is an objective simultaneity in reality, and therefore that simultaneous events are not identical to frame-relative synchronous ones. 

The history of astronomy shows that such definitive evidence was not necessary to make the case that the Earth is actually a planet orbiting the Sun. And the reasons heliocentrism was accepted before the definitive parallax measurements were observed are important as well, providing further precedent we can consider in the current situation.

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Sharpening the swords, part I:  The positive case for heliocentrism prior to the “smoking gun” of observed stellar parallax

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Heliocentrism’s acceptance over geocentrism was historically based on two lines of evidence: logical coherence and simplicity, and empirical accuracy. And while only the former is immediately relevant to the debate between objective and frame-relative simultaneity, it is worth considering both in the historical context.

In the eyes of those who first saw that heliocentrism affords a better explanation of phenomena, it was not a desire for improved accuracy that motivated them. It was the nuanced connections between specific phenomena in place of descriptions that had been cobbled together in the Ptolemaic model. For example, astronomers had always been aware that Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn enter retrograde loops only at opposition, when they are on the opposite side of the celestial sphere from the Sun. Ptolemy explained retrograde loops by having each planet move on an epicycle that itself orbited a larger deferent. When the planet reached the near side of its epicycle, its motion ran opposite to the epicycle’s orbital motion around the deferent. If the planet’s speed around the epicycle exceeded the deferent speed at that point, the planet would appear to move backward—producing a retrograde loop.

But all of this motion refers only to the planet’s position and its movement, and is completely independent of the Sun’s position. It is possible to impose the observed alignments with the Sun, but those alignments aren’t actually required. 

In contrast, heliocentrism explained that retrograde motion is actually caused by parallax shifts as we overtake the outer planets in their orbits. These parallax shifts cause the planet to appear to loop backwards in their usual motion relative to the background stars, even though they continue moving in the same direction the whole time. This explanation did require accepting that the actual phenomenal backwards motion is not due to real backwards motion, which there was less historical precedent to support than there is now — but for those able to accept the possibility, heliocentrism further explained why these retrograde loops must occur only at opposition.

Now, in fairness to the geocentrists, it’s not that they were completely unfamiliar with the concept that there is merit in explanation through a logically coherent connection to a common underlying cause. In fact, the geocentric model did provide a neat explanation of changes in apparent brightness of the outer planets — i.e. the three further from us than the Sun in the geocentric model. As the planets moved around their epicycles, they would all be closest, and should appear the brightest, when they are in retrograde; and on the opposite side of their epicycles, where they were furthest, they would appear dimmest. Indeed, the outer planets are brightest when in retrograde and at solar opposition, and they are dimmest at solar conjunction. 

The geocentric model also explained why the outer planets all had the greatest angular speed when they were furthest away, at solar conjunction: at this point, the deferent and epicycle speeds add together, so the planet is seen to move the fastest. 

It is actually possible to build a geocentric orrery that captures all these features. The Moon orbits closest, then Mercury and Venus, with the centres of their eccentrics tied to the angular position of the Sun, which is the fourth “planet” from the central Earth. And beyond that, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn all move along their own deferent-and-epicycle paths. And while the centres of their epicycles are not tied directly to the Sun the way they are with Mercury and Venus, and their orbits each take longer the further they are from the Earth, the planetary orbits around the epicycles themselves can be linked to the Sun’s relative position. This way, when the Sun comes between the Earth and the planet, the planet is at its furthest point from Earth, and when the Sun is on the opposite side of Earth, the planet is at its closest point to us.

This was a beautiful clockwork model, and it did tie the Sun’s position to all the alignments, the apparent speeds, and brightnesses we observe. In this model, the Sun’s position alone is the gear that drives the entire orrery. But this model failed to explain why the Sun should be the gear, when all the epicycle and deferent speeds could have been anything else. 

In contrast, this link was fundamentally required in the heliocentric model. When the Earth comes between the Sun and an outer planet, the planet is closest and appears brightest. And since the Earth and the outer planet are moving in the same direction, with the Earth orbiting faster, the planet actually appears to move backwards for a while. Similarly, when the Earth comes around to the opposite side of the Sun from the outer planet, it’s at its furthest point and its dimmest. And at that point, the Earth and the planet are moving in opposite directions, so the planet’s apparent relative speed is greatest. 

Thus, a link between apparent speeds and brightnesses and the Sun’s relative position was required as an identical feature of the heliocentric model, whereas that link had been assumed in principle, with no fundamental reason to explain it, in the geocentric system.

There were other downstream phenomena as well, whose patterns geocentrism could describe but were not required within the framework. For instance, there is no inherent reason, according to geocentrism, why the size of the outer planets’ retrograde loops should appear to decrease with their distance. It’s true that if the epicycles were all the same size, for instance, perspective would lead to this — but there’s actually no inherent reason why Saturn, for example, shouldn’t have had a relatively large epicycle that would appear larger to us than that of Mars or Jupiter. 

On the other hand, heliocentrism fundamentally explained the observed order as a direct consequence of parallax shift: because Mars is closest, its parallax shift must be the largest, and so on. The order that is observed must necessarily be that way, according to heliocentrism. 

Similarly, the order in speed of planetary orbits did not have an inherent explanation in the geocentric model. Of the outer planets, Mars has the smallest deferent but also moves around it with the greatest speed, Jupiter’s is larger and it moves more slowly, and Saturn’s is largest and it moves slowest of all along its deferent. But there is no inherent reason that explains why this pattern should be as observed, according to the geocentric framework. 

In the most general case, heliocentrism also does not provide a reason why planets that are further from the Sun should orbit with slower speeds. Therefore, initially neither framework offered an inherent explanation of the phenomenon. Eventually, however, Newton did find an explanation for this apparent pattern which more than two millennia of geocentrism dominance had failed to explain: it was all because of gravity. According to Newton’s law of gravity, which also explained other features of the heliocentric orbits, closer planets had to be moving more quickly, otherwise they would spiral into the Sun — so the planets that formed there are the ones that had the right speed to actually remain in orbit. And for the same reason, Saturn had to be moving the slowest because if it was going any faster it would have spiraled outwards — so again, the planet that formed there had to have the speed that would leave it in orbit. Orbital speeds that had been arbitrary under geocentrism became an identical requirement under heliocentrism, as eventually explained through Newtonian gravity. 

Finally, heliocentrism consolidated the planets under one group. In the geocentric model, the two groups — inner and outer planets — are bifurcated. The inner planets’ deferent motion is linked to the Sun while the epicycle motion is untethered. Meanwhile, the epicycle order follows the pattern noted above: Mercury’s smaller epicycle is orbited with greater speed than Venus’s larger one. In contrast, it is the outer planets’ epicycle speeds that are linked to the Sun’s relative position, while their deferent speed is essentially untethered. And in this case, it’s the untethered deferent speed that follows the pattern of the inner planets’ epicycle speeds: Mars’s relatively small deferent is orbited with the greatest speed, and Saturn’s relatively large deferent is orbited with the slowest speed. 

There is a beautiful symmetry between these two distinct classes: deferent motion is tied to the Sun for inner planets while epicycle motion is tied to the Sun for the outer planets; neither the epicycle motion of the inner planets nor the deferent motion of the outer planets is tied to the Sun, and all could in theory be arbitrary, but all five follow a pattern of decreasing speed as size increases. As such, the two classes had fundamentally distinct yet related rules. But, importantly, none of these rules was inherently required — they were empirical rules that the model imposed ad hoc.

But heliocentrism both consolidated the two distinct classes into a single class of planet, and it explained all the observed patterns. The “epicycles” of the inner planets and the “deferents” of the outer ones both became their orbital paths around the Sun. And as noted already, the pattern in orbital speed was explained by Newton’s law of universal gravitation. Meanwhile, the links between the Sun and the inner planets’ motion along their deferents, and the outer planets’ motion along their epicycles, were both explained as matters of relative perspective, while we also orbit the Sun. These links to the Sun were therefore tied to a combination of the planet’s orbit around the Sun and our own.

For early adopters of heliocentrism like Aristarchus, Copernicus, Digges, Bruno, Rothmann, Galileo, and Kepler, it was not greater empirical accuracy but greater logical coherence and explanation that supported their conviction that the radically different explanation was right. That had been enough for Aristarchus to propose the model in the first place, in spite of the contradiction with the Earth’s apparent rest. And it was enough for Copernicus to resurrect it 1800 years later. It was enough to convince Galileo, who added further support through his telescope observations and his explanation of the relativity of inertia. And it had been enough to convince Kepler, who discovered his three empirical laws of planetary motion, which finally did significantly improve empirical accuracy over the opposing framework.

But even that improved empirical accuracy was not enough to generally convince all entrenched mindsets that their preferred geocentric theory was wrong. That came later, when Newton showed that Kepler’s laws could all be recovered through a single law of universal gravitation which explained far more than just the apparent planetary positions and relatively varying speeds at solar opposition and conjunction. It explained why planets should orbit more slowly the further they get from the Sun. It explained why their orbits should be ellipses. It explained the tides. It explained why apples fall from trees, and why an apple and a pebble fall at exactly the same rate.

And the overwhelming logical coherence and simplicity of Newton’s explanation — along with its improved empirical accuracy — is what finally led to widespread acceptance of heliocentrism more than a century before the definitive confirmation of observed stellar parallax. All of heliocentrism’s strands of explanatory coherence had converged under Newton’s law into a single, inevitable pattern, so that Bessel’s “smoking gun” observation amounted to confirmation of a phenomenon that was already universally considered inevitably true.

Yet that is only half the historical precedent. If the explanatory power of heliocentrism shows how coherence and necessity can point us toward truth, the persistent failures of geocentrism show just as clearly how ad hoc fixes and patched-together models reveal a theory’s bankruptcy. To see the full spectrum of rules to guide scientific explanation, we must turn from the positive case for heliocentrism to the negative one against geocentrism.

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Sharpening the swords, part II: Ad hoc tweaks and patches, and the negative case against geocentrism

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Having seen how heliocentrism’s coherence provided a positive precedent, we must now consider the other side of the ledger: the liabilities of geocentrism. Up to this point I have emphasised its apparent virtues — the many symmetries, connections, and regularities that once made it appear elegant. But that was only half the story. In reality, the Ptolemaic system carried liabilities so severe that they amounted to a negative case against it on its own merits. In 1543, Copernicus himself characterised it as a Frankenstein-like monster — a creature assembled from disparate pieces which, while all individually beautiful, came together as a monstrous whole.

This stood in stark contrast to the idea of a clockwork orrery driven by the Sun alone. The orrery was elegant in principle, but in the Ptolemaic case it had long since broken in practice, crippled by the repeated need to modify it so it could match the observed motions of the planets as closely as possible.

Since the planets actually are a system of bodies following elliptical orbits around the Sun, with speeds ranging from slowest when they are farthest from the Sun to quickest at their closest approach, it makes sense that a system of circular epicycles orbiting deferents centred on Earth should need some adjustment. This was achieved, first of all, by shifting Earth’s position relative to the centre of the deferent, to a point called the eccentric. This shifted vantage point, which had to be set individually for each planet, achieved two things at once: the extra variation in distance helped account for the effects of each planet’s non-circular, elliptical orbit; and from the eccentric perspective, even with the planets moving uniformly, the epicycle would not appear to be moving uniformly around the deferent.

Adding the eccentric greatly improved the accuracy of the model, but a well-calibrated model still wouldn’t track the planets’ actual motion for long. Even greater accuracy was achieved by adding a second point — the equant — as a separate off-centre point from which the epicycle’s motion around the deferent would actually appear uniform. This exaggerated the non-uniform apparent motion from Earth’s eccentric position and enabled the calibrated model to achieve much greater accuracy.

The Ptolemaic model, incorporating the eccentric and equant, achieved wonderful accuracy in predicting individual planetary positions. But it also broke the orrery. All the clockwork alignments that the basic theory had provided — though it hadn’t been naturally tunable to the observational data with any great accuracy — were destroyed by offsetting the Earth and moving the planets around their circles with varying speed. Each planet’s motion had to be described on its own, if it would achieve the greatest accuracy. 

And in the case of the Moon specifically, the model that captured its variation in apparent diameter as it moves closer and further from us on its elliptical orbit had to be different from the one that fit its position in the sky. 

The result was a theory that, in separate respects, was elegant, observationally accurate, and qualitatively aligned with appearances — but never all at once. And what’s more, geocentrism’s initially beautiful explanation had to be supplemented with ad hoc tweaks and patches that forced the original hypothesis to fit real-world data. 

Each of these features, in turn, was justified only to solve a problem that existed because the original explanation predicted appearances that naturally should have been different from what was actually observed. 

As a result, all the positive features that gave the appearance of an elegant explanation of the planets’ wandering motion — the natural alignments, the symmetries, and the order — combined with the beautiful insights that the Earth must be slightly shifted from centre and that there is a non-trivial off-centre point from which motion should actually appear uniform — were really all parts of an elaborate façade. The beautiful individual parts came together in the form of a grotesque monster, as Copernicus noted.

In contrast to the positive case for heliocentrism outlined above, the fact that the initially beautiful explanation of geocentrism had to be supplemented with ad hoc tweaks and patches that forced the initial hypothesis to fit real-world data was — to him — evidence that the model was fundamentally flawed. 

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Laying weapons on the table: epistemic rules observed in the geocentrism-heliocentrism debate

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The precedent established through the geocentrism-heliocentrism debate provides several important lessons that we can carry forward, even when direct confirmation of one theory’s basic principles and falsification of the opposing stance has not been made. In such cases, when fundamentally different frameworks both account for the same observations, the following rules can help us judge between them.

These rules thus provide rational guidance in conditions where decisive empirical confirmation is lacking. History shows that when direct tests do become available — as stellar parallax did in this case — they resolve the debate in favour of the framework already best supported by structural coherence, parsimony, and resistance to ad hoc patchwork.

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Drawing the parallel: how the established epistemic rules inform the choice between objective and frame-relative simultaneity

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With both sides of the historical precedent in view — heliocentrism’s coherence and geocentrism’s liabilities — we can now ask what lessons they hold for the present problem of rest and simultaneity. Our two competing principles similarly lead to starkly different descriptions of physical reality, and the precedents explored above should help guide our judgement. The positive case shows how explanatory unity, logical coherence and explanation, and the resistance of naive realist urges, all point us to deeper truth even before empirical confirmation. The negative case shows how ad hoc patches and conceptual contradictions reveal a theory’s bankruptcy even if it tracks appearances at a descriptive level. Taken together, these lessons prepare us to examine relativity’s competing accounts of simultaneity, where the same contrast between coherence and incoherence emerges just as starkly.

On the one hand, we have the description of relativistic space-time given by cosmology. Here, there is an objective cosmic simultaneity convention and associated state of rest. Our universe is described as a three-dimensional space, expanding as everything within it evolves in cosmic time. Due to the relativity of inertia and synchrony, individual observers who are actually moving through the universe will not notice their non-trivial inertia locally, and they can describe the events that unfold in cosmic time from the perspective of their own relative state of rest. 

Nevertheless, the universe itself is understood to have formed 13.8 billion years ago, beginning from a singular state, with matter and radiation gradually cooling and decreasing in density as it expanded. Eventually, galaxies formed, and they evolved to form the filaments of clusters and superclusters interspersed with voids in the cosmic web we observe today.

Cosmologists noted early on that while this picture spoils the pure general relativity of motion that was thought to be a hallmark of relativity theory, it is nevertheless fully consistent with the theory, with local empirical data. And it is required if we would explain the cosmological redshift-distance relation by means of a cosmic expansion of space.

Yet many relativists continue to treat Einstein’s identification of simultaneity with frame-relative synchrony as unquestionable truth — as though the matter were closed, rather than a philosophical choice to be decided on examination of the evidence. Particularly in the philosophy community, though there are also physicists — generally, theorists whose interest falls outside astrophysics and cosmology — who argue that there is no objective state of rest nor an associated definition of simultaneity in reality. These people (who are, remarkably, in the majority today — who in fact follow Einstein himself) prefer to define motion and simultaneity as purely relative — as matters of convention.

On this basis, they have uncovered several fascinating and intriguing logical insights. For instance, there are several relativistic mechanisms that could potentially be used for time travel — though each one requires a violation of some physical law or other (e.g. superluminal travel, negative mass, crossing through a singularity) that nature does not seem to allow. 

This version of relativity is also thought to support the concept of a block universe — a four-dimensional reality, with all events throughout eternity occurring at once, in which time does not actually pass and our experience of it is simply an illusion.

In fact, even cosmology is influenced by our tendency to identify ontological simultaneity with frame-relative synchrony. While an objective, cosmological simultaneity is assumed in the standard model, the simultaneous events are defined as occurring synchronously in the cosmic rest-frame. Therefore, while anyone who is moving within that frame will describe the simultaneous events as occurring asynchronously, the cosmological rest frame itself is the one privileged by the prior definition that simultaneous events actually do happen synchronously. 

The standard cosmological model therefore becomes a sort of hybrid, or compromise, that tries to align with both principles at once. Rather than exploring relativistic cosmologies generally, assuming an objective simultaneity without imposing a privileged frame in which simultaneous events are also synchronous a priori, we restrict ourselves to only those in which Einstein’s simultaneity convention holds true in the cosmic rest frame. Consequently, the universe itself is described as the space that expands in the course of this frame’s proper time. And various parameters describing age, the apparent expansion rate, the densities of various forms of energy, and curvature, all faithfully represent these aspects of the universe. The universe is, overall, faithfully represented by the parameters in the cosmic rest-frame description, because the universe is assumed to be synchronous in that frame.

Finally, the identification of synchronous events in any reference frame with “space” at a given instant is also what leads to the conclusion that black holes, with massive singularities resulting from completed gravitational collapse, exist now in our universe. The standard reasoning used to draw this conclusion rests on the literal reading of synchronous events in general frames of reference, as the events happening “now” within those descriptions. And in doing so, it characterises inevitable events which can never be observed — no matter how close an observer may get to a collapsing star — as really occurring in finite time. 

Each of these four examples leads to the same kind of disjointed picture geocentrism produced before Newton — disparate explanatory rules, arbitrary constraints, and paradoxes treated as fundamental features of reality that require ad hoc patches to match observations. In what follows, we’ll examine each in turn — time and relativistic now, time travel scenarios, cosmology’s synchrony problem, and black hole formation — setting them alongside their historical precedents and the epistemic rules established above, to see how those lessons should inform the present debate.

Time and relativistic now

The basic rationale used to support the common belief in a block universe is that if any event outside my present light cone can be described as happening “now,” depending only on my own present inertial state — which itself can’t be the essential cause of any distant event’s “nowness” — then objectively I must admit that all of them are happening now. But at any one of those events, there could likewise be an observer for whom “now” intersects with any event in both my past and future light cone, depending on their own inertial state. But since the “nowness” of those events also can’t depend on the inertial state of that distant observer, I must also admit generally that all events in my past and future light cone are happening now as well. Therefore, all of space-time is happening now — all of eternity, in a single flash meta-occurrence.

This is a textbook reductio ad absurdum. If my past and future events are all happening now, then what about now — and now — and now? Is all of eternity supposed to happen again and again, “simultaneously” with each moment of my apparently unfolding existence? We all clearly seem to exist, and if every event throughout all eternity happens simultaneously, and we at-once burn all events that ever happen, rather than describing them to happen as a three-dimensional universe exists — which is surely what seems to be the case — then there can’t even be an apparent unfolding of events. Because even that appearance could only happen — could only make sense — if something exists — whether that’s all of space-time or just the three-dimensional universe. 

That existence — whether of a three-dimensional universe or the full block — entails a dimension of reality in addition to the thing supposed to be doing the existing. In the case of cosmology, where we describe a three-dimensional universe that exists, the events that happen throughout its existence form four-dimensional space-time — a projected map that captures of all phenomena that ever happen. In the case of a block universe’s supposed existence, the time-dimension of cosmology gets spatialised, and every event that happens throughout eternity reified, as it is imagined to exist along with the full history of evolving, expanding spaces that describe each cosmic instant. 

Proponents of the block universe framework do not treat the four-dimensional set of occurrences as a one-off, as a set of events that all happen while nothing exists “before” or “after” this flash of all eternity. They invariably imagine it to exist — to endure — so that within it humans might experience an apparent conscious unfolding of our lives rather than the atemporal, nonexistent flash that the ontology and the physics should rather entail. 

The idea that the block universe exists therefore logically entails another dimension — a meta-time in which the block is imagined to exist, just as cosmology’s three-dimensional universe is imagined to exist in cosmic time, with all the events that happen within the universe in the course of unfolding cosmic time organised within an abstract four-dimensional space-time. 

At the heart of the block universe interpretation, there is a collapse of the distinction between “occurrence” and “existence,” by which occurrences themselves — i.e. the events of space-time — are imagined to exist.

In contrast to block universe proponents, operationalists who prefer to maintain Einstein’s convention that simultaneity should be trivially linked to frame-relative synchrony, but who want to avoid carrying that commitment forward to its absurd conclusion, take a different course. Instead, they take the metaphysically unstable view that “now” is actually completely ambiguous, and that only events within an observer’s past light cone — which is invariant and does not depend on their own inertial state — have “become” certain. This supports a notion that time may actually pass, though what is occurring “now” elsewhere remains uncertain until it becomes observable. It is a view that focuses its attention on empirical reality, and treats unobservable reality as though it is not physically meaningful.

But as I said, this view is metaphysically unstable, as it is incredibly restrictive and is not maintained in practice. Theorists who initially claim this preference might, for other reasons, imagine that a multiverse exists far outside the limits of our past light cone. They might imagine a cosmological separation of space and time, and suggest that in the earliest fraction of a second that “space” underwent exponential inflation that carried a region that was initially causally connected far outside any particular location’s past light cone so that this “space” still, “today,” extends beyond the limits of our cosmological horizon. 

In fact, the entire concept of black hole formation through gravitational collapse rests on an interpretation of events that can never possibly enter the past light cones of any observer, as having “already” happened. While physics indicates that these events are inevitable, the inference that they “have happened” and are in any external observer’s “past that lies beyond their light cone” is both a modal fallacy (since inevitability does not equate to prior certainty) and an abandonment of operationalist principles. Indeed, the claim that a gravitationally collapsing object has “already” reached its event horizon establishes a preference for the description of synchronous events in certain frames of reference over the synchronous events described in others, where the same event is described to remain forever a future inevitability that doesn’t come to pass.

Thus, the operationalist stance is metaphysically unstable, and no physicist can consistently claim to support both a pure operational interpretation of relativity, one that identically equates simultaneity and synchrony, and to consider multiverse scenarios, inflation, or black holes as physically meaningful possibilities. Any stance that selectively ascribes to either view in its own applicable realm is both logically and metaphysically incoherent.

In contrast to either the block universe or the operationalism-inspired, ambiguous reality, the cosmological principle of an objective three-dimensional universe with associated definitions of “simultaneity” and “rest” affords a clear, coherent, and non-paradoxical description that aligns with all the evidence from both cosmology and local experiments. The existence of such an objective “universe” does not affect local relativistic experiments or theoretical descriptions. It simply means that now is not ambiguous, but remains well-defined regardless of one’s inertial state, and that proper times, and conventional space and synchrony, are all measures relative to the objective cosmic standards.

In this view, time does pass, just as it appears to do, with existence unfolding gradually rather than all events happening at once. And there is no metaphysical instability: one merely takes on the responsibility of ensuring theoretical constructs like multiverses, inflation, and gravitational collapse scenarios are interpreted in a manner that’s consistent with that basic principle.

Space-time becomes an abstract projection of the events that occur in reality. The phenomena that occur, and however they appear to us and are described in our proper reference frames, are not trivially identified as “reality” itself. Space-time itself doesn’t exist — it’s existence’s shadow. Space-time, in this view, is the apparent description of events that occur in reality. And as we ought to expect, it takes shape differently when described from different perspectives.

And this is only possible because we’ve relinquished the prior commitment made by Einstein, which trivially identifies apparent, frame-relative synchronous events with simultaneous ones. Once we admit that physical reality does not always present itself faithfully in the phenomena, as the historical case of heliocentrism made abundantly clear, the choice to trivially identify simultaneity with apparent, frame-relative synchrony in principle, appears arbitrary and dogmatic if there is no other evidence to support it. It is a choice that privileges one theoretically viable definition over another equally viable one, based only on a preference to tie appearances directly to the basic reality that gives rise to them. And the historical case of geocentrism vs heliocentrism has both falsified this as an epistemological principle — proving that it is both sometimes true and sometimes not true — and clearly demonstrated that it is a dangerously misleading one to follow with any deep conviction.

In fact, the historical precedent already goes a long way towards showing that operationalism as a general epistemological principle is dangerous — that it should be applied quite cautiously — since it is quite clear that Earth’s status as a planet that really orbits the Sun, while this may have been beyond the limits of direct observation, was essential to the whole Scientific Revolution. To forget this, and to decide that only directly observable phenomena are physically meaningful — as we do when we deny the relevance of an objectively well-defined universe beyond our causal past — is a commitment to an epistemological principle that has already been thoroughly falsified.

Finally, we should also consider the fact that several phenomena simply had to be imposed in addition to basic geocentric principles, to ensure alignment with observations. For example, geocentrism was unable to explain why certain planetary alignments should be connected with the Sun, nor could it explain the apparent pattern in orbital speeds with distance from the Sun, while these were both essentially explained as necessary consequences of Newtonian heliocentrism. Similarly, the apparent unfolding of existence, the non-trivial passage of time we do observe, and the unshakable notion of a physical reality that presently exists beyond here and now, are all basic features of a relativistic theory in which objective, cosmic rest and simultaneity are assumed. Just as each of these is a problem to be resolved if we choose to commit to Einstein’s trivial identification of simultaneity and frame-relative synchrony, they are all trivially resolved under the identity that there is an objective, frame-independent state of rest and associated simultaneity in reality.

Time travel

The ambiguity of simultaneity and the assumption that space-time itself is reality have been linked in various ways to the possibility of relativistic time travel. If “now” is genuinely ambiguous — and in principle extends into what would be another frame’s “past” — then near-instantaneous travel through such a “space” could take a traveller to a “past” moment at some distant location. From there, a second near-instantaneous jump through a different “space” that connects with a point lying in the past of the original location would bring the traveller into their own past. Similarly, if one could move in a way that generates a closed timelike curve, as in Gödel’s space-time solution, they could in principle travel to some moment in their own past or future.

But if “now” is not ambiguous — if there is an objective simultaneity — and if space-time is, to begin with, not reality but an abstract description of events that happen in an existing three-dimensional universe, these scenarios collapse. And the apparent paradoxes dissolve in the same way. In this case, reality evolves independently of one’s own motion, and past and future events are not permanent things that could be visited. All that exists is the three-dimensional universe, describable from any frame (while rarely if ever synchronous); the space-time diagrams we construct are projections that vary wildly with the particular frame we describe them in, but do not themselves constitute “reality.” 

Under this framework, time travel and its paradoxes — which in the Einsteinian framework required constraints like a finite speed limit or the chronology protection conjecture — disappear by identity. This is like the heliocentric resolution of the inner and outer planets’ motions and their link to the Sun: geocentrism could only make that connection through unrelated ad hoc principles, but heliocentrism fundamentally required it to happen.

Cosmology and the synchronous universe

Above, I noted that while the standard model in cosmology does align with the principle of an objective simultaneity, it adds a further constraint that simultaneous events must happen synchronously in the cosmic rest frame. Then, since the actual universe is the synchronous space in that frame, phenomenological parameters like age, the expansion rate, and its relationship with energy densities and curvature, actually represent real values as well.

Given what’s been said above about appearance vs fundamental reality, these direct links between phenomenological values and the universe they come to describe is reason to be cautious. The synchrony principle of the standard model is not suggested by empirical evidence, but amounts to a useful simplifying assumption in the absence of a concrete alternative. But the model also poses a number of unresolved problems of the exact form we’ve identified with geocentrism, that further raise suspicion.

First, there is the problem of cosmic expansion itself. According to the standard model, as we go back in time towards the big bang the deceleration of the expansion rate due to the matter and radiation within it increases exponentially. The big bang models, which come into existence from an infinitely contracted singular space, start off with infinite deceleration that works against the expansion of space well into their history before any repulsion due to dark energy-type effects become significant. Even inflation, while it is supposed to have happened very early on, does not explain why the universe should expand: expansion is already happening, inflation occurs, and then the field becomes insignificant while the exponentially decreasing deceleration rate kicks back in and continues to work against the universe’s continued expansion, as well as its very existence. 

This is essentially the reason behind Fred Hoyle’s tongue-in-cheek moniker, the “Big Bang”: not only do these models lack a fundamental reason why they should exist, but the universe actually tries with everything in it to halt that expansion, the fundamental cause of which gets chalked up to an even more violent initial singularity where/when the physics is indeterminate. Similarly, in The Expanding Universe, Eddington compared the problem to a comparison between the solar nebular hypothesis, as offering a natural explanation of our solar system, and some arbitrary initial projection of planetary orbits all in the same direction around the Sun — possible, but devoid of any deeper rationale:

“[The Einstein–de Sitter theory] leaves me cold. One cannot deny the possibility, but it is difficult to see what mental satisfaction such a theory is supposed to afford.”

The mathematics fit the observations, but the cause it invoked — “that in the beginning all the matter created was projected with a radial motion so as to disperse even faster than the present rate” — simply asserted the very expansion it was meant to explain — and with it, the very existence of the whole expanding universe.

Similarly, from a relativistic perspective we should also like to know why the universe should have come to exist with an objectively defined state of rest, cosmic time, and associated simultaneity — and also why it appears to have been expanding precisely uniformly throughout its observable history, even though it long ago became lumpy, and general relativity in principle suggests local expansion should be varying accordingly.

Once the CMB’s discovery in 1965 confirmed a hot, dense early state, these questions largely receded from view; expansion from that early state became an observational fact to be modelled, not a phenomenon to be explained from first principles. Nevertheless, the fact remains that our best model indicates that all the matter and radiation in the universe initially worked against expansion while any repulsion due to dark energy was initially negligible; that it is only through significant inertia imparted at an initial moment when the physics breaks down, that an expanding universe such as the one we describe should exist.

In contrast to this expansion/existence problem, both the flatness problem and the horizon problem are widely appreciated, as is their favoured resolution, the inflation scenario. The flatness problem arises because standard cosmology permits a wide range of possible spatial curvatures, yet observations indicate that the universe is nearly exactly flat. However, a precisely flat universe is essentially impossible within the range of possible initial conditions, and any small deviation from flatness in the early universe should have been exponentially amplified over cosmic time so that the universe should now have significant curvature. 

Similarly, the horizon problem stems from the extreme uniformity of the CMB temperature across regions that, under standard general-relativistic evolution, should never have been causally connected. Any two points separated by more than about two degrees on the CMB sky should have evolved independently, yet the observed temperature fluctuations are correlated to better than one part in a hundred thousand, despite there being no causal mechanism to enforce this without inflation. 

Inflation is widely considered the best available resolution to both the flatness and horizon problems since an early phase of exponential expansion would dynamically drive the curvature of space to be flat while stretching once-causally connected regions far apart. However, inflation introduces its own theoretical challenges — including the measure problem, fine-tuning of the inflationary potential, and the apparent inevitability of eternal inflation — raising concerns over whether it can even resolve the problems it purports to explain away. 

Nevertheless, both problems are epistemically equivalent to the expansion/existence problem: the standard model describes a universe bearing the empirically constrained properties without issue, but the actual phenomena themselves lack theoretical motivation without an ad hoc mechanism to drive the universe’s evolution so that it would match what we observe. Without this ad hoc mechanism, the universe should not be as we observe it.

The energy budget of the universe presents an even deeper problem. While standard cosmology describes the evolution of the universe using precisely measured parameters, it does not explain why these parameters should take the values they do — or even what most of the universe is made of. Observations indicate that baryonic matter and radiation account for only about 4% of the total energy density of the universe, while the remaining ~96% is attributed to invisible dark matter and dark energy. Furthermore, theoretical estimates of vacuum energy from quantum field theory exceed the observed dark energy density by an astounding 120 orders of magnitude — yet for unknown reasons, this vacuum energy appears to have no observable effect on expansion. 

Again, while empirical modelling provides a consistent description, the theoretical justification for these components remains elusive. And this difficulty is compounded, even, by the so-called Hubble tension, wherein independent measurements of the expansion rate based on early- and late-time data disagree at a statistically significant level, raising concerns that the inferred energy budget may not even be internally consistent. 

Recent proposals such as early dark energy seek to resolve this discrepancy by varying the vacuum energy from that of a cosmological constant, introducing additional degrees of freedom that enable fine-tuning. But from an epistemic standpoint, this simply reinforces the broader issue: while the standard model describes the observed expansion history well, it does not explain why its parameters should take the values they do. Instead, it chalks the explanation up to increasingly exotic invisible components, like the orbiting centre of the epicycle or the equant.. Thus, this “energy budget problem,” like the flatness and horizon problems, is another example of the standard model accurately fitting the data in the absence of fundamental explanation.

In contrast, elsewhere I have developed an alternate cosmological model in which the universe is not synchronous in the cosmic rest frame, which must expand uniformly regardless of local matter densities, and according to which the phenomenological expansion rate is required to be exactly the observed expansion rate of the standard flat-ΛCDM model. This alternative attains the same level of explanatory elegance that heliocentrism did over the geocentric model, without collapsing appearance and reality a priori, and explaining the apparent patterns we observe as necessary features without needing to assume additional ad hoc principles. And as heliocentrism paved the way to Newton’s deeper explanations, this model signals strong potential for a deeper explanation of the objective space, time, and simultaneity conventions it must assume kinematically, that would connect to a fundamentally non-singular origin of the universe. 

Just as heliocentrism dissolved the patterned coincidences that had been described by geocentrism into necessary consequences of a deeper kinematic truth, this model transforms the apparent coincidences of the standard model into inevitable predictions that are necessitated by an underlying geometric structure.

Just as Newton’s single, coherent principle dissolved the tangled scaffolding of epicycles, eccentrics, and equants, the right foundation in modern physics would render today’s baroque contrivances unnecessary. The lesson is as plain as it is persistent: when a theory is fundamentally right, its architecture grows simpler, not more elaborate. When it is wrong, patches multiply. The eccentric, the equant, and the entire Ptolemaic clockwork were refinements meant to force a fundamentally ill-fitting framework to match the sky; in our own era, inflation, dark matter, dark energy, and evolving dark energy serve the same role. Each was introduced not from independent necessity, but to preserve descriptive alignment within the synchrony-bound framework, when observation refused to fall in line with fundamental expectations. History’s verdict on such manoeuvres is unequivocal — they are not signs of strength, but of a foundation that will not bear its own weight.

Gravitational collapse and black holes

As noted above, the usual justification for inferring that completed black holes now exist rests on the claim that collapsing matter crosses an event horizon in finite coordinate time in some reference frames — even though it never reaches the horizon in finite coordinate time in others. A frame-invariant fact about gravitational collapse is that the horizon-crossing event never enters any outside observer’s past light cone; horizon formation is forever outside the causal past of every possible external observer, no matter how close they approach the black hole.

In the case where frame-relative synchrony is assumed to accurately describe simultaneous reality — which leads by induction to a block universe description — none of this is a problem. In this case: time does not pass; nothing happens before or after anything else; all space-time events happen at once, in the flash occurrence of eternity wherein “reality happens”; nothing exists, and the whole endeavour of physics is an epistemic desert, as described above and in this essay.

In the operationalist interpretation, where frame-relative synchrony is taken to provide the only physically meaningful description of simultaneity, but “now” is wholly ambiguous, the idea of black holes hits a snag. Since the horizon formation event (prior to collapse completion) never enters the past light cone of any external observer, there is no operational sense in which an external observer can ever say that a horizon “has” formed. From a die-hard operationalist standpoint, black holes are therefore physically meaningless objects (beyond asymptotic signatures like high redshift and late-time freezing as collapsing matter causally appears to approach the horizon).

Finally, in the cosmological case, where the universe is an evolving, objectively defined space with objectively well-defined simultaneity, the gravitational collapse problem actually gets interesting. In this case, there are some “nows” in which the collapsing matter does cross its event horizon and plunge all the way to a singularity in finite “time,” while other definitions of “now” describe the collapse as only asymptotically approaching the horizon in infinite “time.” So the question is: does the horizon really form, and does the gravitationally collapsing object really plunge all the way to a singularity in finite cosmic time? Or, does the collapse actually take infinite cosmic time to even reach the horizon?

While it is outside the scope of the present essay to give this problem the careful treatment it needs, I have done so elsewhere — and the result is that the collapsing matter does not reach its own event horizon in finite cosmic time. The common belief that black holes presently exist in our universe, as fully-formed event horizons harbouring massive singularities following complete gravitational collapse, is an inference drawn by privileging an unphysical synchrony convention for defining the cosmic “now” — one under which the collapse completes — over the physically meaningful simultaneity defined by the universe’s own evolving rest frame, in which the collapse never finishes.

In a sense, in the case of black holes, the standard model was snuck in through a conceptual back door. The inference critically depends on the notion that frame-relative synchrony in a given frame amounts to a viable description of simultaneity — hence, since some descriptions show that black holes do form in finite “time,” the inference that they actually do form in finite time carries. The problem is that that inference can only be coherently drawn in the epistemically vacuous case of the block universe, as it’s physically meaningless from a pure operationalist standpoint, and false from a cosmological one. In fact, the only scenario in which a completed black hole might have emerged as a physically interesting object is the cosmological case, but within that framework black holes are physically quite different — they’re all in reality still collapsing, asymptotically approaching their event horizons in cosmic time.

But when this logical inconsistency is ignored, and the completed black hole is allowed to masquerade as a dynamically existent thing — whether treated as realistic within cosmology or meaningful within operationalism — the result is no end of downstream conjecture. Cosmic censorship is invoked to prevent naked singularities, while the information loss paradox has spawned elaborate proposals for how quantum information might be preserved or destroyed at an event horizon. Firewall proposals, wormhole escape routes, white-hole “time-reversed” objects, holographic horizons, fuzzballs, and remnant scenarios have all been suggested to reconcile problems that emerge when black holes are understood to be formed in finite time. Each seeks to avoid contradictions that arise once the event horizon is treated as a literal surface in reality and the singularity as an actually existing place in an existing space-time. 

Whereas each of the first three examples above has a reasonably close analogue in the geocentrism–heliocentrism debate, the black hole case is in a class of its own. Here, the mismatch is not merely a matter of piling on arbitrary constraints or clinging to inherited conventions; it is the wholesale adoption of an inference that only makes sense inside a metaphysically incoherent framework, smuggled into operational and cosmological discourse as though it were physically established. There is no historical precedent for this kind of conceptual short-circuit in the annals of astronomy: not even Ptolemaic geocentrism, in all its epicyclic contortions, never inferred entities whose defining properties could never, in principle, be physically instantiated in the relevant frame of reference.

Taken together, these four cases show that modern relativistic practice has drifted into precisely the sort of explanatory disunity and ontological carelessness that Newton’s synthesis once rescued astronomy from. The difference now is that the conceptual gaps are not seen as signs of trouble but as features rebranded as “mystery” rather than recognised as incoherence. Just as Newton’s dynamics reframed the celestial sphere as a system governed by a single coherent law, any viable reform today must expose the arbitrary constraints and paradoxes for what they are: symptoms of an incoherent interpretive framework. Only by doing so can physics return to a unified account in which appearance and reality meet, and in which empirical success is grounded in genuine explanatory necessity rather than in the inertia of inherited conventions.

The precedents are unmistakable — and so is the next step. In the heliocentrism debate, the cumulative theoretical case was unassailable long before stellar parallax was observed, but it was that single, direct observation which settled the matter. Relativity has now reached the same threshold. What remains is to identify the equivalent observation — the modern parallax — that directly and decisively confirms the reality of an objective cosmic time and its associated simultaneity.

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The smoking gun: just as stellar parallax is only explained by heliocentrism — and so ends the debate — the uniform isotropy of the CMB is only explained by an objective cosmic time and associated simultaneity.

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The fact that the CMB is precisely isotropically redshifted today cannot be explained merely by the primordial plasma having been uniform at recombination, with small density anisotropies producing minor Sachs–Wolfe gravitational shifts. Those photons have been in flight for the entire history of the observable universe, and the cosmological redshift we measure is the cumulative effect of the local expansion rates of the space they passed through along the way.

There are only two logical possibilities. Either:

1. the expansion rate was perfectly uniform everywhere and at all times, so every photon experienced the same redshift history; or
2. local expansion rates varied, but the cumulative differences from billions of years of travel just happened to cancel to yield exactly the same total redshift in every direction.

Case (b) is not just implausible but mathematically excluded. It’s a simple matter to show: taking the observed density variations, their standard perturbative evolution, and the finite number of independent density regions the CMB photons crossed, and applying the central limit theorem, any such variations would produce residual redshift anisotropies orders of magnitude larger than observed. If cosmic expansion varied locally based on local density variations (as some models suggest), the cumulative redshift variations should be vastly greater than the data allow. Therefore the data compel conclusion (a): space itself expanded uniformly throughout the observable universe’s history.

But “space” here must mean cosmological space — an evolving three-dimensional universe — not an abstract coordinate artefact. To say it expanded uniformly “through time” already presupposes a cosmic time, a cosmic rest frame, and an associated simultaneity. This is the only coherent way to describe an entire three-dimensional universe expanding uniformly throughout time. By the logic of the scientific method, the basic hypothesis — that there is an objective, cosmological definition of motion/rest and simultaneity — has thus been empirically verified, with remarkable precision, by the observed isotropic redshift of the CMB.

Furthermore, our direct observation that our own velocity relative to this rest frame is 369.82 ± 0.11 km/s toward Crater (from the CMB dipole) amounts to a direct measurement of our objective cosmic velocity. This is not a coordinate convenience; it is an empirical structure that singles out a unique state of rest. There is no coherent alternative for these observations — neither the precisely isotropic CMB redshift nor our measured CMB dipole velocity — under the opposing principle that time, simultaneity, and motion are purely frame-relative.

Just as Bessel’s nineteenth-century detection of stellar parallax settled the heliocentrism debate, the CMB’s uniform isotropy (together with its measured dipole) constitutes the modern equivalent: a direct, decisive confirmation of an objective cosmic time, simultaneity, and motion. The verdict, like parallax, is final.

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Final remarks: the drawbridge down

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We began at the gates of a fortress. Its three arms of defence — bad metaphysics, misapplied logic, and a shallow operationalism — have for a century sheltered an interpretive orthodoxy that confuses appearance with reality, patches incoherence with new contrivances, and treats methodological limits as ontological truths. The audit conducted here has not tried to scale those walls with rhetoric. It has done what history teaches works: sharpen the right tools, apply them methodically, and let coherence, necessity, and evidence do the heavy lifting.

First, we recovered the epistemic rules from the heliocentrism–geocentrism precedent: (1) resist naïve realism of appearances; (2) prefer structural consequences to parameter-fitting; (3) consolidate under one parsimonious principle rather than multiply ad hoc “mini-laws”; (4) treat ad hoc modification as a red flag, not a badge of progress. These are not slogans. They are the working grammar of grounded scientific inquiry — the very grammar that carried astronomy from Ptolemy’s patched machinery to Newton’s single law.

Then we applied those rules where modern relativistic practice is most exposed:

• Relativistic ‘now’. Identifying simultaneity with synchrony collapses appearance into ontology, and the block-universe inference smuggles in a meta-time. The cosmological alternative — objective simultaneity without trivial synchrony — preserves the category boundary between occurrence and existence, aligning with both local experiments and global coherence. Verdict: the Einsteinian identification fails Rules 1–4; the cosmological view passes them.
  
• Time travel. Treating space-time as what exists licenses paradoxes, then forbids them with conjectural fences. Under objective simultaneity, time travel is impossible by structure, not by patch. Verdict: the Einsteinian view invites and then mends contradictions, while the cosmological view makes their absence necessary.
  
• Cosmology’s synchronous universe. The standard model elevates a frame-synchronous description into ontology, then sustains it with ad hoc adjustments — inflation, dark matter, dark energy, and, now, evolving dark energy to ease the “Hubble tension” — ingenious, but epistemically indistinguishable from epicycles, eccentrics, and equants. An asynchronous, objective-simultaneity alternative makes the observed expansion rate and coherence structural necessities, not tuned outcomes. Verdict: the standard model’s virtues are descriptive; its liabilities are rule-breaking. The alternative unifies and entails the reality we observe.
  
• Gravitational collapse and black holes. Completing collapse “in finite time” relies on privileging synchrony slices that no external observer can ever inherit causally, then papering over the resulting contradictions with censorship, firewalls, fuzzballs, holography, and remnant schemes. In objective cosmic time, collapse never completes in finite cosmic time — the horizon is never even reached — black holes are perpetually forming. Verdict: the completed black hole is inferred through inconsistent logic, and consequential problems have to be patched; consistently applied principles lead to coherent physics — and a result that’s fundamentally different from what we’ve imagined.
  

Across these four cases the pattern repeats with numbing consistency: where appearances are taken as reality, patches multiply; where deeper structure is allowed to lead, explanation consolidates, empirical reality aligns with expectations, and paradoxes dissolve by identity. This is exactly the shift heliocentrism accomplished over geocentrism, and Newton over Ptolemy: from descriptive clockwork to necessary law.

At this point, “mystery” is a misnomer. What is called mysterious in relativistic physics is in fact incoherence — a self-inflicted confusion about what our symbols describe. It is not a virtue to preserve an ambiguity about “now” that local experiments can’t resolve, then appeal to that very limitation to deny ontological structure; it is not rigour to elevate frame conventions to metaphysics and then invent ever finer patches to quiet the contradictions that follow. The lesson of the Scientific Revolution was not “shut up and calculate,” but calculate where the world’s structure points, even before the smoking gun arrives — and then recognise the gun when it goes off.

And it has gone off.

The uniform isotropy of the CMB redshift, together with the precisely measured CMB dipole, is the modern stellar parallax. This isotropy is not a lucky coincidence of path-integrated variations; the central-limit calculation with observed density perturbations excludes that. The only coherent reading is that cosmological space expanded uniformly through time, which already presupposes a cosmic time, a cosmic rest frame, and an associated simultaneity. Our measured velocity of 369.82 ± 0.11 km/s toward Crater is physically significant: it is a direct measurement of our own motion with respect to an objective, “absolute” state of rest. Like Bessel’s observation, this has no coherent interpretation within the opposing framework; it settles the modal question that was falsely declared to be unanswerable.

The philosophical cost of refusing this is not small. To retain the Einsteinian identification of simultaneity with synchrony, one must either (i) accept the block universe — and commit, against every fibre of intuition, to the fact that to describe it through only four physical dimensions, nothing at all can be said — or even thought — to exist, since in this case all of eternity must simply happen at once, or (ii) retreat to a pure operationalist interpretation that renders the entire universe beyond ourselves — the Sun, stars, galaxies, as well as black holes, multiverses, and inflationary domains — physically meaningless, even as those same constructs are used to interpret the cosmos. The first route is devoid of any dynamical or kinematical physics — a theory of relative motion according to which nothing actually moves, or even exists; — the second is a self-crippling denial of external reality. Both fail the rules that history already proved reliable.

By contrast, the cosmological interpretation — objective simultaneity, not trivially identified with synchrony — asks for no metaphysical indulgence and makes no operational promises it can’t keep. It leaves local relativistic experiments untouched, restores global temporal structure where the evidence demands it, and treats space-time for what it is: a projection of happenings in an existing world, not the world that exists. It is parsimonious where the standard view is profligate; it is explanatory where the standard view is evasive.

What follows from this is not a rejection of relativity’s mathematics but the rightful demotion of a metaphysical identification that was smuggled in at the start and never earned by evidence. Synchrony remains frame-relative; simultaneity is not. In practice that means: build cosmology, gravitational collapse, and high-energy theory on the correct ontological footing. Stop elevating coordinate artefacts and graphical representations of events that occur to existing reality. Stop treating paradoxes as profundities. Reverse the order: ontology from evidence; kinematics from ontology; coordinates from kinematics.

If the fortress still stands, it is because institutions have learned to defend method against philosophy, not because the defence is sound. The defenders have prestige, funding streams, and elegant calculi; they have also — as history shows — the wrong rules. The breach is not rhetorical; it is structural. Once seen, it does not unsee.

So the task ahead is plain. Retire the patched clockwork. Let coherence and necessity be the standards again. Take the four rules that worked in the most important fundamental correction in the history of physics, and wield them without compromise. Treat the CMB for what it is — the cosmic parallax that ended the debate — and build atop the only interpretation that survives both the epistemic audit and the data. When physics does this, the complications recede, the exceptions vanish, and the architecture grows simpler, not more elaborate. That is what it looks like when a theory is fundamentally right.

We began before a fortress. We end with the drawbridge down, not because we shouted louder, but because history’s method, applied carefully and without fear, has done again what it always does: separate appearance from reality, retire the beautiful monster, and make room for a framework in which empirical success is no longer a patchwork miracle but the inevitable expression of a coherent world.