This exploration weaves together three ideas.
The first is drawn from the “top-down” flavor of quantum cosmology associated with Thomas Hertog and Stephen Hawking: the universe is not best pictured as starting from one perfectly sharp first frame with a single, uniquely defined past already written. Rather, it can be described as a quantum state that assigns weights to many possible coarse-grained histories—and the “past” we speak about is the one inferred given what we observe now.
A second idea comes from Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, which show that mathematics is an inexhaustible landscape of truth: for any sufficiently expressive, consistent axiomatic system, there will be true statements it cannot prove from within itself. The third idea, from Heisenberg’s account of reality’s layered order, is that different domains of the world—microphysics, thermodynamics, life, mind, culture—have their own stable connections and demand languages that fit their scale.
What we can say or measure depends on the context that makes phenomena legible.
A central metaphor helps connect these concepts. Imagine a timeless Library containing every consistent mathematical blueprint for a universe: every geometry, every interaction scheme, every internally coherent pattern of histories a theory could assign weight to. The Library is static, but it has floors—regions of description with distinct grammars: quantum, thermodynamic, biological, cognitive. Each floor has its own notion of “object,” “cause,” and “law,” not because reality fractures, but because intelligibility does.
Now imagine a single Path traced through the stacks. That Path is our world.
Early on, the Path winds through a region where alternatives overlap—where description is naturally quantum and where “what happened” is not a single crisp narrative but a spread of possibilities constrained by the framework and by the data we condition on. Later, the Path enters chapters where stable, law-like behavior dominates: where atoms persist, chemistry holds, and the regularities we call “laws” become reliable effective rules for creatures like us. Our present observations function like clues at the end of a mystery: they don’t merely report a past, they help select which families of histories are relevant to talk about at all.
Observers are not external to this story; they are part of the mechanism by which a branch of the Library becomes readable. This is the worm’s-eye tube perspective: inside the world, you never hover above the stacks—you move through a narrow corridor of records, memories, and measurements, a tube lined with durable traces that make one history feel singular from within.
We can visualize the process as a ladder.
At the base, quantum systems begin as structured possibilities. Through interaction with surroundings, interference between alternatives is suppressed in practice: delicate superpositions lose their coherence relative to the degrees of freedom that matter for the next rung. But the crucial step for “public reality” is not only fading interference—it is the growth of records: stable patterns that get written redundantly into the environment so that many observers, sampling different fragments, can agree on what happened. Measurement, then, is not a passive read-out; it is the making of a record within a particular context, on a particular floor of the Library.
On the next rung, context determines what counts as a fact. Some descriptions exclude others not by contradiction but by scope: each chart is adequate on its floor and for its questions, and it can fail by being asked to speak a language it was never built to speak. A thermodynamic arrow, a molecular collision, a metabolic pathway, a social norm—these are not rival tales about the same object so much as different grammars for different kinds of stability.
Higher up, life evolves to read persistent records. Senses compress the world into actionable cues; brains turn cues into models; models court surprise, and surprise forces revision. At the top, science and mathematics amplify this feedback loop: instruments extend our reach, statistics and method stabilize facts across observers, and symbolic languages let us store hard-won regularities outside the skull.
Gödel’s theorems provide a gentle horizon to our confidence—not a veto on unification, but a warning against imagining that any single finite list of axioms will exhaust mathematical truth, or that any final vocabulary will make every possible question decidable. Even if physics converges toward deep principles, we should still expect what experience already teaches: excellent, domain-true laws—theories good enough to land probes on comets—that nonetheless bend, break, or generalize at their extremes, and that rely on layered descriptions rather than one all-purpose tongue.
Hertog’s lesson adds a further nuance: the relevance of a description is history-bound. Some regularities become meaningful only after the universe cools, structures form, and certain degrees of freedom become the right handles to grab. Time, therefore, belongs to the Path—not as a mystical current, but as the order in which records accumulate, correlations propagate, and entropy tends to rise given a special low-entropy past. The Library, however, is timeless: its structures simply are. Both views can be true because they speak at different levels: the journey and the map.
Mathematics bridges these perspectives. As a territory, it is an inexhaustible structure. As a practice, it is the evolving craft by which worm’s-eye travelers—moving through their tube of records—extract stable order from that structure, and test whether yesterday’s models will still guide them tomorrow.