Relativity revolutionised our understanding of space and time — merging them into a unified spacetime continuum that bends, curves, and stretches in response to energy and matter. But even in relativistic physics, there remains a temptation to treat spacetime as a container: a stage on which fields and particles play out their dynamics.
A relational ontology invites a deeper shift. Rather than viewing spacetime as a geometric entity filled with things, we see it as a field of relations, structured by constraint and coherence, with no underlying substrate beneath them.
1. The Inherited Picture: Geometry as Background
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General relativity describes gravitation as the curvature of spacetime geometry,
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This suggests that matter “lives in” spacetime, deforming it through energy-momentum,
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But this picture sustains a substantivalist intuition: that spacetime is something that exists independently of the phenomena it hosts.
2. The Relational View: Spacetime as Emergent Configuration
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From a relational standpoint, spacetime is not a thing, but a topology of potential — the structured field in which coherent relations can arise,
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Distances, durations, and curvatures are not pre-given but emergent from the coherence of relational interactions,
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What we call “geometry” is a map of constraint: it tells us how actualisations can distribute across possibility.
3. Event, Not Entity
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Einstein’s field equations relate spacetime curvature to energy and momentum — but only through local interactions,
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In a relational ontology, these interactions are not between entities in space, but are themselves the very configuration of space and time,
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A spacetime “point” is not a location in a pre-existing manifold, but a minimal site of relational coherence.
4. Bridging Quantum and Relativity
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Both quantum theory and relativity resist object-based metaphysics: one through entanglement, the other through distributed curvature,
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A fully relational ontology aligns them: quantum fields as coherence under constraint, and spacetime as the topological pattern of those constraints,
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In this light, spacetime and quantum processes are not separate layers, but different aspects of a single relational field.
Closing
Spacetime is not where things happen — it is how relation happens. Its structure is not the scaffolding of reality, but the outcome of systemic coherence within and across scales of interaction.
In our next post, we’ll explore how this relational reframing transforms our understanding of symmetry, invariance, and conservation — and what it means for physics to seek “laws” at all.
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