Starting point
This research originated outside the academic world and has been independently developed over many years from philosophical, physical, and cosmological questions. The central idea is that coincidence need not be understood as a phenomenon in its own right, but as something that acquires meaning only from the perspective of an observer.
Without an observer, there is no experience of coincidence. There are only processes, structures, and events within the universe itself. The concept of "coincidence" always requires a subject that experiences something as unexpected or inexplicable.
Coincidence as perception
What we experience as coincidence can be understood as a consequence of our limited position within the whole. From a complete perspective — with knowledge of all causes and initial conditions — there is no coincidence, only the inevitable outcomes of a causal chain.
God does not play dice with the universe. — Albert Einstein
This research aligns with Einstein's deterministic intuition but extends it: even the observer who believes they see the dice game is part of the game itself. The perception of coincidence is an information problem, not a property of reality.
It follows that free will, as commonly understood, is equally non-fundamental. What we experience as free will is a human experience within a much larger process that we can never fully oversee. This does not make free will unimportant — it places it on a different level of description.
Consciousness and the universe
Consciousness is typically regarded as something the human being possesses — a property of the human brain. In this framework, consciousness is positioned differently: as an expression of the universe itself, not as something standing outside or above the rest of reality.
DNA, life, consciousness, and human experience did not arise independently of the universe, but within the universe and through the universe. Evolution, in this light, is not a random process but an expression of universal structures that unfold under the right conditions. The human being is not an exception to reality, but a continuation of it.
The observer as part of the system
A recurring theme in this research is the blind spot of the scientist: the observer who believes they stand outside the system while they are inseparably part of it. This problem is not new — it plays a central role in quantum mechanics — but its consequences are rarely followed to their logical conclusion.
Nothing can exist outside the universe. Every measuring instrument, every observer, every theory is a phenomenon within the universe describing the universe. This has consequences for how we understand scientific objectivity, and for the limits of what we can know.
The thought experiment
To support the central claims, a new thought experiment has been developed: the stationary universe. Imagine the universe frozen completely — no electron moves, no photon travels, no quantum fluctuation occurs. In that state, time does not pass. Free will cannot be exercised. Change does not occur.
These are not features that disappear when the universe is frozen. They reveal themselves, under that condition, to have never been fundamental. They are experiential — real for us, real within our dimension of existence — but not properties of the universe at the level at which it operates.
A full description of the thought experiment is available in the published works on Zenodo.
The Radical Continuum
The most complete formulation of this framework is the Radical Continuum: a timeless ontological framework in which the universe exists as one uninterrupted continuum of processes — without past, present, or future as fundamental features.
Time is not a fundamental quantity but an emergent phenomenon arising from embedded observation. Determinism is reformulated as a structural property of the continuum, independent of temporal causality. The framework offers a fourth route beyond the three classical responses to Bell's inequality — timeless structural correlation — and resolves the measurement problem of quantum mechanics without introducing consciousness as a fundamental quantity.
The Radical Continuum is available in Dutch and English via Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20714065).
Connections in science
This research connects with major questions that have also been raised in physics, cosmology, and philosophy — not to replace or correct the work of others, but to make a different coherence visible from an independent perspective.
Thinkers such as Einstein, Bohr, Bohm, Penrose, and 't Hooft have each questioned, in their own way, the limits of the standard model and the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Bohm's hidden-variable theory, Penrose's twistor theory, and 't Hooft's deterministic quantum model connect directly to the themes developed here. The Radical Continuum positions itself in explicit relation to each of these approaches.