To scientists working on the foundations of physics

To whom it may concern,

I am writing to you as an independent researcher with no university affiliation. I am aware that this is an unusual position from which to address the foundations of physics. I ask only that you read the argument before judging the source.

For many years I have followed, with close attention, the debates surrounding determinism, quantum mechanics, the observer problem, and the nature of time. Not as a passive reader, but as someone who has found these questions genuinely unresolved — and who believes that the deadlock persists, in part, because of an assumption so deeply embedded in scientific practice that it is rarely examined.

That assumption is this: that the observer stands outside the system being observed.

In classical physics this position was never seriously questioned. In quantum mechanics it became unavoidable — the observer's act of measurement alters the outcome — yet the deeper implication was not drawn. The observer is not merely an influence on the system. The observer is part of the universe, subject to the same processes, the same causality, the same structure as everything else within it. There is no vantage point outside. There never was.

From this single starting point — unremarkable as it sounds — a chain of consequences follows that I believe has not been fully worked through.

If the observer is inside the universe, then coincidence — as a fundamental property of nature — cannot be sustained. What we call coincidence is always the experience of a positioned observer with incomplete access to the causal chain. At the level of the universe itself, there is no coincidence. There are only processes, structures, and events that unfold according to their own internal necessity.

This is not a new intuition. Einstein held it, Spinoza held it before him, and in modern physics Gerard 't Hooft has argued for superdeterminism along closely related lines. David Bohm's pilot-wave theory points in the same direction. What I propose is not that these thinkers were wrong, but that the argument can be made more directly — by starting with the observer's position rather than arriving at it through technical reformulations.

The thought experiment I use is simple. Imagine the universe frozen — all processes halted simultaneously. 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 are features that 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.

The consequence is this: we live in what might be called a human dimension. Our experience of time, choice, and chance is genuine as experience. But it does not map onto the underlying universal process, which knows none of these things. We are products of that process. We are not exceptions to it.

I have published this framework in several papers, deposited on Zenodo with DOI registration and available in both Dutch and English. I am not asking for acceptance. I am asking for engagement. If the argument is wrong, I want to know precisely where it fails. If it holds, then it deserves to be part of the ongoing conversation — alongside superdeterminism, Bohmian mechanics, and the other serious alternatives to the Copenhagen orthodoxy.

The Bell experiments are, I know, the standard objection to any deterministic framework. I take them seriously and I am working on a more explicit treatment of them within this model. But I note that 't Hooft has spent decades arguing that Bell's theorem does not rule out superdeterminism — and that his argument has not been refuted, only resisted. The resistance is philosophical as much as it is empirical.

I do not expect this letter to be received without skepticism. Independent work outside institutional structures carries a burden of proof that institutionally produced work does not face in the same way. I accept that. But the universe does not care about institutional affiliation. The question is whether the argument stands.

I invite your critical response. All publications are freely accessible via the links below. I can be reached through the contact page of this website.

Berry Aarts
Independent researcher
Middelbeers, Netherlands
BerryAarts.com