Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Every physical theory is constructed from observations performed within a physical frame, and this frame enters the theory at a level antecedent to its equations — in the categorical structure through which observations are organized into a formalism. This is a structural condition on physical theory as such, not a hypothesis about any particular physical phenomenon; its character is analogous to the principle of general covariance, which constrains the form of physical laws without predicting the behavior of any specific system. The condition has a precise formal consequence in the geometric setting: for any non-invariant tensor field under a frame- transformation group, the components specified in any single frame are insufficient to determine the underlying geometric object without explicit specification of the frame. This consequence has been articulated four times in the foundations of physics — in the tensor reformulation of electrodynamics, in the relativity of simultaneity, in the unification of energy and momentum, and in the geometric unification of space and time — each time by identifying a frame-dependence carried implicitly in the prevailing formalism and absorbing it into a geometric object across the class of frames. Rovelli’s (1996) relational quantum mechanics is the most explicit contempo- rary articulation of the structural condition: the frame is the physical system to which a quantum state is referred, and the relational structure is exhibited directly at the level of the measurement interaction. The condition implies that relationality must arise wherever current physics is examined at the level of its foundations — not because relationality is a fundamental feature of the physics under description, but because it is a necessary feature of any theory constructed from observations performed within physical frames, and open foundational problems are most plausibly resolved by making implicit frame-dependences explicit rather than by eliminating them.
Author: Hassanali, Mahdi
Institution: New York University
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7160973696
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