✦ Ideas & theories · 4 June 2026
Reality as flow
Notes by a non-physicist on an intuition that, for some years now, has not left me in peace. Nothing proven: only a way of looking.
Note added 20 September 2026
This text predates the revision, and four of its passages have not held up.
Maximum density is treated here as a constant. It is not: it depends on the size of the region you look at, and it changes by forty-five orders of magnitude. The formula, for its part, does not say how large the effect expected in the voids should be, and I have not yet calculated that number. “It comes out on its own” is exactly the move I now put on trial: an assumption presented as a result. And the anomaly of the too-mature galaxies seen by Webb, which I use here as a clue, has for the most part deflated.
I am not correcting the text. How it went is told in When I asked my idea for numbers: an archive that rewrites its old pages so as never to have been wrong is a shop window.
Let me begin by laying down my arms. I am not a physicist, and what follows is not a theory: it is an intuition, repeated to myself often enough to deserve writing down. I am putting it here the way you put a stone on the windowsill — not because it weighs anything, but so that it stops rolling around in my pocket.
The intuition is this. Perhaps, at the bottom of the world, there are no things. Not particles, not fields, not space-time: all of these would be figures, ripples, ways in which something simpler organises itself. And that something is information. Matter does not contain information: matter is one of the ways information, at a certain scale, holds itself together.
Put like that, it sounds like a one-liner. Perhaps it is. But I have the modest excuse of not being the first to think it.
In good company
This, for me, is at once a relief and a warning. John Wheeler, one of the great physicists of the twentieth century, summed up a closely related idea in three words that became famous: it from bit. Carlo Rovelli argues that the properties of an object do not exist in absolute terms, but only in relation to whatever measures them. Erik Verlinde has tried to make gravity itself emerge from considerations of information and entropy, as though it were not a force but a kind of book-keeping.
I am walking, in short, along a path that people far better equipped than I am have already opened. I lay no claim to the path: I am only saying where it takes me when I walk it in my own way.
The cathode-ray tube and the end of time
It takes me, for instance, to look at black holes in an odd way. In the usual account, a star that runs out of fuel collapses, compresses matter beyond every limit and produces a singularity: a point where the equations stop working and give back infinities. But what if the collapse were not a compression but a draining? What if the star did not implode because it is too full, but because it is emptying — because the flow that fed its processes runs dry, and everything around it pours towards the now-impoverished zone, like water towards a plughole?
There is an image that has stayed with me. Old cathode-ray televisions, when you switched them off, did not go dark all at once: the picture drew back towards the centre of the screen, left a bright dot for an instant, and then a faint residual glow from the phosphor. I try to read a black hole that way. The collapsing star is the picture shrinking towards the centre. The event horizon is the phosphor, the surface on which the information stays imprinted. And the extremely slow evaporation that physicists attribute to Hawking is the afterglow: the glow dying away, over times measured not in seconds but in aeons.
And time? For someone falling in, time does not slow down until it stops. Time ends, like the last page of a book. There is no “after” beyond the horizon, to be reached at reduced speed: there is the point where the flow no longer propagates, and where the flow stops, time stops too.
Which way the current runs
Because this, in the intuition, is what time is: not an external track that we run along, but the very direction in which information propagates, from the denser and more ordered to the more rarefied. Time is not the container of the flow. It is the flow, seen side-on. The famous arrow of time — the fact that the past is different from the future, that eggs break and do not put themselves back together — stops being a mystery to be explained and becomes the most obvious thing there is: we are watching a current as it flows, and a current runs one way.
The same shift of gaze reaches other oddities. In the double slit we are astonished that a particle seems to pass through two openings at once; but perhaps the mistake is expecting a flow to behave like an object. And when the Webb telescope finds galaxies that are already mature a few cosmic moments after the Big Bang — too early to have been built brick by brick — perhaps there is nothing to build: structure is not assembled by matter, it comes before it, because it was already written in the flow.
Where I might be wrong
At this point a serious physicist raises an eyebrow, and rightly so. It is all very beautiful, but a theory that explains everything predicts nothing: it is poetry, not science. It is the objection I put to myself first, every time. And precisely for that reason, the part that interests me most is not the evocative images but the few points where the intuition could break.
I find one by looking at the great cosmic voids. If the flow’s capacity to propagate were greater where there is less matter, light crossing an enormous void ought to reach us as though that region were expanding a touch faster — a small effect, but correlated with the voids, not random. It is something you can go and check in the maps of the sky. And when I try to write down how large that effect ought to be, the only form consistent with the premises is disarming in its simplicity:
I did not choose it to make the sums come out: it comes out on its own, and it is linear — which sets it apart from other possible forms, and so makes it, at least in principle, falsifiable. It may be wrong. But it is the kind of thing that can be wrong, and that is already something. An intuition becomes interesting at exactly the moment it agrees that it might be mistaken.
A question, under my breath
One question remains, which I keep for last and ask quietly, on purpose, because it is the most fragile and the easiest to laugh at.
If reality is a flow of information organised at every scale, rich and layered enough, then perhaps — perhaps — the patterns that at some point fold back on themselves and ask what they are are neither an accident nor a purpose. Not “the universe exists in order to produce consciousness”, but rather: a flow made like this cannot help generating, somewhere, something that looks at itself. Consciousness as an attractor, not as an end.
I do not know. I really do not know, and I distrust myself every time I think about it, because it is exactly the point where an elegant intuition is in danger of sliding into a comforting fable. I leave it here as an open question, not as an answer: it is the stone that goes on rolling, even after I have set the others down on the windowsill.
None of this, I will say it again, claims to be right. It claims only to be a good way of looking for a few minutes — and perhaps to make you want to look better than I have.