Time, Space, and the Evolving Lawbook

The classical Newtonian picture treats space and time as a fixed background and physical laws as eternal invariants. Einstein already dissolved the background — in general relativity, spacetime is dynamical, curving in response to mass-energy. Recent work in quantum gravity has pushed further: in approaches like loop quantum gravity (Rovelli), causal set theory (Sorkin), and AdS/CFT (Maldacena), spacetime itself is emergent from a more fundamental layer of quantum entanglement or discrete causal structure. Carlo Rovelli's 2018 The Order of Time is the most readable popular synthesis: time, on his view, is not a primitive of the universe but emerges from thermodynamic and quantum-relational features.

Lee Smolin's 2013 Time Reborn makes a stronger and more contested move. Smolin argues that physical laws themselves evolve — that the regularities we call 'laws' are features of the universe's developmental history, not eternal Platonic objects imposed on it. The motivation is partly methodological (the 'unreasonable' precision of fundamental constants is suspicious if they are taken as eternal) and partly philosophical (an eternal lawbook makes the laws unexplainable in principle). John Wheeler's 1983 'Law Without Law' essay anticipated this: 'There is no law except the law that there is no law.' On Wheeler's view, regularities emerge from a participatory generative substrate rather than being imposed on it.

These views remain minority positions in physics — the standard view treats the laws as discovered, not made. But the minority is not crank; Rovelli, Smolin, and Wheeler are among the most decorated physicists of the past half-century. The relevance to Life Is Perfect's claim that physics co-evolves with complexity is that the philosophical move — laws as features of the system rather than impositions on it — has serious physics defenders, not just contemplative-tradition advocates.

Hoffman's interface-theoretic framing intersects this directly. If perception is a fitness-tuned interface, spacetime is a strong candidate for non-veridical rendering: it is enormously useful for action and almost certainly does not resemble the substrate. The FBT theorem doesn't entail this, but it makes it plausible. The convergence between minority physics (Rovelli, Smolin, Wheeler) and cognitive science (Hoffman) on the non-fundamentality of spacetime is striking even if neither field has yet produced a fully worked-out alternative.

For practice: the felt rigidity of physical reality — solid objects, linear time, predictable cause and effect — is the interface working as designed. The substrate, on this view, is more like a process than a product. 'Physically impossible' is mostly a snapshot of the rules at the moment you happen to be observing.