Relationship Is the Reality

How a mysterious number in physics changed the way I think about film, technology and reality

There is a peculiar feeling that happens when you encounter an idea that rearranges the furniture in your mind. You don’t simply learn something new. Rooms that were never connected suddenly share a doorway. Previously disconnected ideas that live in opposite sides of your thinking begin communicating with each other.

Questions you thought you understood quietly disappear, replaced by better ones. A big idea reframes other conceptions, causing a shift in the neutral net, escalating and reshaping. These reframing nodes don’t usually answer any specific question, but cause the questions initially asked to shift.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’ve been encountering this feeling for most of my adult life. The first time was learning how to edit video to tell stories.

Marshall McLuhan taught me that the medium is the message, introducing me to the idea that media shapes civilization more profoundly than the content flowing through them.

Later, Douglas Rushkoff taught me how technologies don’t just distribute information, but reorganize perception itself.

Now, after what I learned less than three days ago, I begin wondering whether physics points toward a similar insight… that perhaps relationships shape reality more profoundly than the subjects participating in them.

And all because of a number…

137

At first glance, it looks unremarkable. Just an integer between 136 and 138.

But in modern physics, there is a number very close to its reciprocal: 1/137.035999… Physicists call it the fine-structure constant.

And buried inside that name is something extraordinary, because this number determines the strength of the electromagnetic force that allows every atom to function in the universe. If this number were only slightly different, electrons would bind differently to atomic nuclei, causing the periodic table to change. Chemistry as we know it would become impossible and stars wouldn’t be able to forge the heavier elements which planets, and all of us, are made from.

The fine-structure constant governs how light interacts with matter; it allows atoms to form stable structures, allows stars to form and die, and allows our sun to burn, literally determining whether chemistry (as we understand it) exists at all.

Everything you are experiencing right now—the screen in your hand or sitting in front of you, the air between you and it, the air in your lungs, the neurons firing as you read this sentence—all of it depends on this relationship.

And here’s the fact that resists intuition: No one knows why this number- this scientific constant- has the value it does.

Most numbers in physics are accidental in a sense, in that they depend on the units we choose.

The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second because we defined the meter and the second that way. Change the units, and the number changes.

But the fine-structure constant does not have units. Scientifically it is called a dimensionless quantity.

It is dimensionless and it is pure.

Somewhere in the universe (or perhaps across universes), an intelligent civilization that discovers physics may eventually encounter this same number, not because they measure things the way we do, but because it appears to be built into the structure of the universe- built into reality itself.

Richard Feynman called it “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics.” Wolfgang Pauli became obsessed with it, along with Carl Jung. Arthur Eddington spent years trying to derive it from pure mathematics.

Physics can measure it with extreme precision, but physics still cannot explain WHY it is what it is.

What fascinates me is the existence of such constant at the foundation of reality that refuses explanation.

Imagine discovering the source code of the universe. Most of it is clean, elegant, and legible but then you find a single line controlling the strength of electromagnetism. No comment. No documentation. Just a number. Change it slightly and the program fails to run.

That image stays with me, not because I believe reality is literally computational, but because it reveals something about the limits of explanation itself.. that over the very edge of the cliff of human knowledge lies a seemingly endless chasm of mystery, stretching downward into the dark.

As I kept thinking about 137, I realized something unexpected. What fascinated me was not the number itself. It’s what the number is. The fine-structure constant is not a thing. It is not an object you can isolate or hold. It is a ratio describing how strongly charged particles interact. The fine-structure constant measures a relationship

Not an object. Not a particle. Not a force.

A relationship.

The ultimate electromagnetic relationship within everything that gives form. It is a measure of connection. And that word echos everywhere.

Connection

As a kid, when teaching myself how to edit using linear tape, I connected one VCR playing a VHS of my selected take to another VCR set to record the input, and although the crude stops and starts caused analog tape glitches between every cut, the art of starting and stopping playheads on machines with the precise rhythm to create something seemingly magical became one of many personal obsessions.

At the time, I thought editing was about images. But it isn’t.

Editing is about relationships between images.

A shot, in isolation, is almost meaningless. Its meaning only truly emerges from its relationship to what comes before and after it.

The Kuleshov experiment demonstrated this clearly a century ago when the same neutral face appears to show hunger, grief, or desire depending entirely on what it is placed next to. Nothing changes in the image itself except its relationship changes, and yet the meaning changes completely.

Later, I encountered Marshall McLuhan’s argument that we focus too much on content and not enough on the systems that carry it. The printing press didn’t just produce books, but changed who could access knowledge. Film didn’t just record motion, but reorganized memory. The internet didn’t just connect computers, but reshaped attention. Artificial intelligence isn’t just generating language, but altering the relationship between thought and expression itself.

Again and again, what matters most is not the thing in front of us, but the structure that connects things. The medium is the message.

Perhaps this is how understanding deepens. As children, we think the world is made of objects. Trees. Cars. People. Books. Then science teaches us those objects are made of atoms. Physics tells us atoms are mostly empty space. Modern theoretical physics goes further still, describing particles as excitations of underlying fields governed by interactions.

At each step, solidity gives way to structure. Things dissolve into patterns. Objects dissolve into relationships. The more our human capacity of comprehending the universe advances, the more reality seems to be revealed as less a collection of things and more like a network of interactions that temporarily appear as things.

I don’t think the fine-structure constant is a metaphor. It is a measurement- a fundamental physical constant.

Yet, I can’t help noticing the fine-structure constant points toward something arguably even larger than itself…. Inevitably, I view the fine-structure constant as a mysterious metaphysical portal through which the universe / reality seems to reveal its grammar.

Not what exists. But how existence relates to itself. And once you start noticing this, it becomes difficult not to see it everywhere.

When I edit films, I’m not thinking about the shot. I think about the cut. When I read, I notice the distance between sentences as much as the sentences themselves. When I listen to music, I hear the intervals as much as the notes. When I think about technology, I think less about objects and more about systems of relation: networks, flows, feedback loops, attention, memory.

The more I look, the more the world appears less like a set of things and more like an ongoing conversation. Maybe what the fine-structure constant is quietly revealing isn’t a secret code, but a fundamental reminder that even at the most fundamental level of physics, what matters is not isolated entities, but how they interact. The relationship. The connection.

And maybe that is what has been waiting to be noticed all along. In physics. In film. In language. In perception. Even in the simplest act of understanding another person.

Because eventually, every model of reality seems to move in the same direction. From things to atoms. From atoms to fields. From fields to interactions. From interactions to relationships. And at a certain point, you begin to wonder whether “things” were ever the primary category at all.

I don’t know whether physics will ever explain why the fine-structure constant has the value it does. But I know what it taught me to notice. Since learning about it, I find myself looking less at the things that fill the world and more at what exists between… the space between two people. The invisible forces that allow stars to burn and atoms to hold together.

I think they all ask the same question.

Not what is this made of?

But what is this in relationship to?

The relationship is the reality.

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