The theoretical physics community in 2026 remains deeply fragmented. Despite impressive technical progress in several directions, there is still no consensus on the foundations of quantum gravity. Multiple competing research programs coexist, each with its own conceptual framework, mathematical tools, and community. At the same time, public discourse on social media is increasingly shaped by simplified or misleading claims about fundamental issues such as the nature of time or the viability of specific unification attempts. This paper provides a structured assessment of the current landscape (as of early 2026) and situates the Panvitalist Theory (PVT) within it. The PVT is distinguished by a unique combination of features: it models the act of measurement as primary, redefines $\pi$ as a dimensioned quantity ($\pi \equiv T/L$), treats life as a fundamental mathematical axiom, provides an explicit model of free will, and offers a radical de-mathematization. These characteristics position the PVT as a fundamentally different approach that addresses several persistent problems of contemporary programs from a genuinely new foundational angle.
The theoretical physics community in 2026 remains deeply fragmented. Despite impressive technical progress in several directions, there is still no consensus on the foundations of quantum gravity. Multiple competing research programs coexist, each with its own conceptual framework, mathematical tools, and community. At the same time, public discourse on social media is increasingly shaped by simplified or misleading claims about fundamental issues such as the nature of time or the viability of specific unification attempts. This paper provides a structured assessment of the current landscape (as of early 2026) and situates the Panvitalist Theory (PVT) within it. The PVT is distinguished by a unique combination of features: it models the act of measurement as primary, redefines π as a dimensioned quantity (π≡T/L), treats life as a fundamental mathematical axiom, provides an explicit model of free will, and offers a radical de-mathematization. These characteristics position the PVT as a fundamentally different approach that addresses several persistent problems of contemporary programs from a genuinely new foundational angle.
Measurements play a crucial role in quantum mechanics because they serve two fundamental purposes. First, they enable the extraction of information about a quantum system; second, they give rise to new physical effects that do not appear in classical physics, one important example being the measurement-induced state update, where the act of measurement alters the system’s state. For these reasons, the mathematical description of measurements plays a primary role in the foundational postulates of the theory. However, the essence of what happens during a measurement remains poorly understood, even within the relatively easy realm of non-relativistic quantum theory. The situation becomes even less transparent in the relativistic setting, where the requirement to preserve causality and prevent faster-than-light signalling introduces both formal and interpretational challenges, complicating the very mathematical formulation of a measurement theory. As for quantum gravity, the idea of applying quantum measurements within or onto a quantum spacetime remains virtually unexplored, presenting a vast and uncharted frontier for theoretical inquiry. Building on recent advances across several areas at the intersection of quantum foundations, quantum information theory, relativistic quantum theory, and quantum gravity, the last few years saw a surge of interest in formulating a consistent framework for describing local measurements in a relativistic context. The main results of this endeavour are two distinct proposals for a relativistic measurement postulate for quantum field theory in generic spacetimes. While these two proposals are still being understood, and a growing research community is working to clarify their implications and potential interconnections, the field of relativistic quantum measurements has now reached a level of maturity that allows us to ask both formal and interpretive questions on a solid footing. All this only applies to the regime in which quantum field theory in curved spacetime remains valid: nothing can yet be said about measurements at the Planck energy, where quantum gravitational effects are expected to become important. This thesis presents an introduction to the theory of measurements in non-relativistic and relativistic quantum mechanics, along with four original research articles that explore aspects of measurements in both fields, as well as the potential extension of measurement theory to the domain of quantum gravity. The first article examines the limitations of realistic measurement apparatuses in non-relativistic quantum theory, establishing reasonable bounds for the precision that can be achieved with a given apparatus composed of many quantum components. The second article explores how to extract information from a newly introduced class of quantum systems, defined as those that cannot be replicated and thus fall outside the usual scope of quantum mechanics. Then, it applies the methodology to quantum field theory, demonstrating that classical results, such as the Unruh effect, can still be observed in this setting. The third article discusses detector-based measurements in quantum field theory. This is a recently proposed method that extends the non-relativistic measurement postulate to the relativistic regime by means of Unruh-de Witt detectors. The article highlights some conceptual and mathematical issues with the framework and proposes a solution using algebraic quantum field theory. The outcome is a self-consistent scheme for introducing local measurements in quantum field theory via measuring detectors. Finally, the fourth article uses the measurement scheme above to study how what we learned in the past years about local measurements can be extended to quantum gravity. This is achieved through the holographic principle realised in terms of the AdS-CFT correspondence. In conclusion, this thesis contributes to the development of both non-relativistic and relativistic measurement theories and introduces ideas and questions related to the role of measurement in quantum gravity. Though preliminary, this work opens a pathway toward studying measuring observers in quantum gravity.
Modern physics rests on a single step that has never been justified: it treats length as a physical dimension but the angle as dimensionless. From this one asymmetry follow, in sequence, the external time parameter, the treatment of π as a pure number, the modelling of a line as a continuum of points, and -- structurally -- the indeterminism of quantum theory and the singularities of general relativity. This paper argues that the asymmetry is a category mistake, that its deeper root is the substitution of a \emph{genus} for an \emph{individual} as the standard of measure, and that the remedy is not a new theory of the universe but an honest restriction of physics to what a measurement can be: a rational comparison of two real objects, Va=xVb, governed by the single relation π≡kT/L between angle and length. The Panvitalistic Theory (PVT) does not claim to model nature; it models the act of measurement, and in doing so it returns to theology and metaphysics the questions of infinity and of the nature of the universe that standard physics has quietly annexed. One consequence cannot be evaded: a measurement must be initiated by a living observer, and a theory of measurement must therefore decide -- axiomatically, not experimentally -- between a dead and a living universe. We show why this question cannot be left open, and why only one of the two answers is coherent.
From the very beginning, Quantum Mechanics has been accompanied by crucial foundational questions: the possibility of visualizing physical processes, the limits of measurement epitomized by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the existence of a deeper underlying reality with additional degrees of freedom, the role of measurements, and the status of locality. Long regarded as philosophical speculations, these issues were progressively reformulated into precise mathematical statements and ultimately subjected to experimental verification. The trajectory proved unpredictable: questions once dismissed as metaphysical gave rise to experimental platforms, which in turn matured into devices and technologies powering quantum computation, communication, and sensing. Yet this development is not unidirectional: advances in technology also feed back into foundations, enabling tests of principles that were previously out of reach, for example, whether quantum superposition persists at larger and larger scales and whether reality, gravity included, is fundamentally quantum. In this way, the dialogue between foundational inquiry and technological progress continues to shape both our theoretical understanding and the practical realization of quantum phenomena.
Abstract This article does not claim to present a successful theory of quantum gravity. Instead, it undertakes a systematic and self-aware survey of the research program aiming to derive both quantum mechanics and general relativity from a purely relational network, based on a set of minimal ontological postulates. The framework rests on three axioms: (1) physical reality consists of nodes without intrinsic properties and their symmetric relations; (2) the relation strengths are non-negative and symmetric, with the total information capacity conserved as an ensemble expectation; (3) local evolution is restricted to redistribution of relations within triads. We honestly display and rigorously distinguish the conceptual achievements from the essential obstacles of this framework. On the quantum side, we obtain solid conceptual progress: the Born rule, unitary evolution, and topological nonlocality of entanglement all emerge naturally as representation-theoretic consequences of the statistical description of a finite information capacity network. This strongly suggests that the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics may be a generic feature of the statistical representation of any complex informational system satisfying “finite information + local relational evolution.” On the gravitational side, however, we encounter chasms that current mathematical and conceptual tools cannot bridge. A central contribution of this article is to clearly label these obstacles as fundamental open scientific problems: the conflict between a positive-definite relational ontology and the target of pseudo-Riemannian signature (signature problem); the missing coarse-graining procedure from a discrete network to a smooth manifold (coarse-graining problem); and the disharmony between external algorithmic time and emergent physical time (time problem). We argue that these are not technical details unique to this framework, but core challenges that any “spacetime from relations” program must confront. The article positions itself as a “conceptual cartography”—it precisely delineates the known boundaries of this research program, exposes the fatal rift often bypassed in mainstream discourse, and transforms all unresolved issues into a formal invitation for future investigation.
This paper proposes a foundational framework in which the unification problem—specifically, gravity's persistent resistance to integration with the three Standard Model forces — arises from a categorical difference rather than a technical one. Gravity is treated as the self-interaction of the universe as a single system, operating across a multi temporal geometric structure with at least two temporal axes: a forward temporal axis experienced sequentially by 4 dimensional observers, and one or more lateral temporal axes along which quantum branching occurs simultaneously. Standard Model forces are confined to the forward temporal axis. Gravity propagates across the full temporal geometry. This categorical asymmetry explains why conventional unification machinery fails without invoking new particles or undiscovered symmetries. The framework further proposes that the quantum measurement problem dissolves under quantum monism: wavefunction collapse is not a physical event but a perspectival artifact of 4D-bound observers sampling a laterally extended structure they cannot fully resolve. Bell's separability assumption is identified as the contrivance, not a constraint the framework must satisfy. A specific, falsifiable prediction is proposed: a cosmological correction term α in the Penrose gravitational collapse threshold, detectable as a directional bias in superposition collapse outcomes correlated with the CMB dipole axis. The mathematical structures required to formalize the framework are identified precisely, and connections to existing programs — Wheeler-DeWitt cosmology, Bars' two-time physics, Verlinde's entropic gravity, Penrose's Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, and Zurek's envariance — are drawn explicitly. This paper does not claim to resolve these structures. It claims to identify them with sufficient precision that the resolution becomes a tractable mathematical problem.