Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools....
Romans 1:22
"Increasingly, we are being told that the things physics studies are not real.
Romans 1:22
"Increasingly, we are being told that the things physics studies are not real.
Time is not real.
Particles are not real.
Space itself is not real.
Q: What, then, are physicists studying?Two recent New Scientist articles, taken together, show just how deep the problem has become.
One asks why matter has mass.
The other declares that matter doesn’t exist.
We’re solving the fundamental mystery of how reality is glued together (New Scientist, 6 April 2026). Michael Brooks teases that
This report on the strong nuclear force begins with a striking admission:
“As you read this, every atom in your body is desperately trying to tear itself apart … If atoms obeyed only electricity and magnetism, the universe would have been a brief, bright firework. Instead, something else intervenes, a force so strong it makes electromagnetism look feeble … keeping the building blocks of atoms glued together.”
And then the problem:
“The equations that describe it look disarmingly simple, yet follow them through and something puzzling happens: a theory built from weightless ingredients somehow produces particles that are unmistakably heavy.”
This is the Yang–Mills mass gap problem, one of the most important unsolved questions in physics. The theory describes quarks and gluons that are, in themselves, massless. Yet the particles they form, protons and neutrons, account for nearly all the mass in the visible universe.
No space, no time, no particles: A radical vision of quantum reality (New Scientist, 27 October 2025). In this article, Vlatko Vedral suggests that we can solve fundamental problems of physics by replacing particles with mathematics.
If the first paper struggles to explain why things have mass, the second questions whether “things” exist at all.
In a sweeping reinterpretation of quantum theory that frees us from the observer-collapsing the wave-function paradox,we are told:
“It’s not just observers that don’t exist – there are no particles either.
Space and time don’t exist at all.”
What remains is not matter in Vedral’s world, but mathematics. Reality is recast as “q-numbers,” abstract elements in quantum equations. Particles, space, time, even observers are reduced to convenient labels.
The motivation is familiar. Quantum theory has long struggled with the role of the observer, the collapse of the wavefunction, and the paradoxes of entanglement. Rather than resolve these tensions within a realist framework, this proposal discards the framework itself in favor of “pure” mathematics.
Lest the irony escape us, it is worth stating plainly. If mathematics determines what is real, then the direction of explanation has been reversed.
What began as a method for describing the physical world now defines what is allowed to exist.
Only Two Paths Remain
One path is some form of idealism. Reality is ultimately mathematical, relational, or mental. The physical world becomes derivative, a projection of underlying abstract structure. Vedral’s proposal fits squarely here, whether or not he, or the many others
The other path is that reality is grounded in a source beyond itself, one capable of giving rise to both the mathematical order and the material structures we observe.
This path does not end inquiry. It makes sense of it."
CEH
