A new foundational paper introduces the ontology beneath the Panvitalistic Theory — and with it, a radical proposal for the deepest unsolved problem in physics.

For more than a century, physics has lived with a contradiction it cannot resolve. Its two greatest achievements — Einstein's General Relativity, which describes gravity and the cosmos, and Quantum Theory, which describes the world of particles — cannot be made to agree. Each works superbly in its own domain. Together, they break. Every attempt to unify them, from string theory to loop quantum gravity, has run for decades without reaching the goal.

The Panvitalistic Theory (PVT) makes an unusual claim about why. The problem, it argues, is not that we have failed to find the right equations. The problem is that the foundation was laid crooked, three hundred years ago, with a single step so small and so familiar that no one thought to question it.

The new foundational paper, Ontological Foundations of the Panvitalistic Theory, sets out that step in plain language, without a single equation — and shows what follows once it is corrected.

The step nobody questioned

Take the most elementary act in all of geometry: connecting two points. Physics has always treated the connection as having a physical dimension — length. But two points can be joined by a straight path or a curved one, and the difference between them is an angle: the curvature of the connection.

Here is the step. Physics treats length as a real, physical dimension. It treats the angle as a mere number, dimensionless, carrying no physical reality of its own.

There is no justification for this. A curved line is not the same kind of thing as a straight line — it carries information, its bending, that a straight line does not. To keep one half of geometry as "physical" and discard the other as "just a number" is an arbitrary amputation. And yet this one unexamined decision is the hinge on which all of modern physics turns.

What follows, unavoidably

Once the angle is stripped of its dimension, three consequences follow on their own — no further choices required.

First, the curvature that was taken away from the angle has to go somewhere. So physics exports it into a brand-new axis: an external time parameter, bolted on beside the three dimensions of space. This is precisely the move Einstein made in 1905. He modelled velocity as a one-dimensional line — distance over time — and was therefore forced to introduce a separate, external time to carry the second dimension, the curvature, that the dimensionless angle had thrown away. The famous "second time" of relativity, and the entire Lorentz apparatus built to protect it, exist only to compensate for a dimension that was discarded at the very start.

Second, with the angle reduced to a number, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter becomes a pure number too: π = 3.14159…, irrational, never ending. To pin down that endless number, the circle must be imagined as a polygon with infinitely many sides, and a line must be imagined as a continuum of infinitely many points. In this quiet way, the assumption that infinity is physically real slips into physics as an unspoken axiom.

Third — and this is the heart of the matter — these two moves produce the two great failures of modern physics, not as accidents but as structural inevitabilities. Quantum indeterminism is the shadow of a continuous external time that no measurement ever actually sees: nature is measured in discrete, finite steps, while the theory predicts on a smooth continuum, and the probability cloud is the gap between them. Gravitational singularities — the infinite densities at the centre of black holes and at the Big Bang — are simply the buried assumption of real infinity surfacing as a division by zero. Restore the angle as a dimension, and the singularity becomes a finite boundary; the infinity was never in nature, only in the model.

Why this means a physics without constants

This is where the PVT makes its most provocative demand, and it must be stated carefully, because the usual objection misses it entirely. The objection runs: "But physicists already know the constants aren't absolute — just set c and ℏ to 1 and they vanish." This does not refute the PVT. It demonstrates it.

Setting c = ℏ = 1 does not eliminate the constant. It hides it, by promoting a coupling of two scales to the status of a convention. And that is precisely the point. The very fact that c can be used to set length equal to time, or ℏ to set energy equal to frequency, reveals what these "constants" actually are: bridges between scales — conversion factors that re-join two measurement scales which were artificially separated in the first place. They are the seams of a unit system, not features of nature.

The decisive evidence is the Planck length. It does not exist on its own; it appears only when one multiplies G, c and ℏ together, and its numerical value depends entirely on the choice of those scales. A quantity whose very existence requires three "constants" to be welded into a single scale is not a measure of nature — it is the artifact of the welding. The existence of the Planck units is therefore not a triumph of the standard framework but the fingerprint of its inconsistency: the theory has manufactured a scale that exists only as the product of its own scale-bridges.

So the PVT's demand is more radical than "no constants in the final answer." It is a demand about how an equation may be built: units and scales may not enter the mathematical formalism at all. The Schrödinger equation does not merely happen to contain ℏ — it contains ℏ structurally, as the very quantity that couples an energy scale to a time scale. Einstein's field equations contain G and c the same way. You can set them to 1, but the coupling of two scales remains welded into the formalism, and it is exactly that coupling the PVT forbids. There is no energy scale to be joined to a time scale, because there are no separate scales to begin with — only the single rational relation between angle and length, π = T/L, on whose powers every Planck unit turns out to be nothing more than a power of π.

This is why the demand is not arbitrary but logically forced. Every measurement is a rational comparison of two real objects — this diameter is so many times that one — and nothing else. There are no metres, no seconds, no kilograms hidden in nature; there are only real things, compared. A "metre" is a fiction. What exists is the Earth, the water, the atom — individual objects we choose as our standard of comparison.

Seen this way, General Relativity and Quantum Theory are not so much wrong as unfinished. They are powerful, accurate, indispensable — and built on a formalism into which scale-couplings were welded from the start. They carry G, c and h because those bridges hold the two artificially separated scales together; and they cannot be unified because the bridges are exactly where the two theories were sawn apart. The crack between them is not a gap to be closed by a cleverer equation. It is the seam left by the scales that should never have been introduced.

A question of will

And so the PVT reframes the greatest problem in physics as something unexpected: a question of will.

One can choose to go on accepting that the foundational science of nature rests on a category mistake — that its deepest puzzles are permanent features of reality rather than artifacts of a crooked start. Or one can choose to lay the foundation cleanly, without the mistake, and follow the consequences wherever they lead.

If one makes the second choice, the path is hard but well marked. The whole of physics must be reformulated under one strict condition: no constants, no units may appear. That is a demanding programme. But it has two great virtues.

The first is that it gives an immediate filter. Any proposed unification that still relies on a constant of nature can be set aside at once — it has not reached the foundation. Decades of candidate theories can be sorted in a single stroke.

The second virtue points to the future. The task — to rewrite all of physics mathematically under the constraint that no constant and no unit may appear — is a well-defined mathematical problem. It is exactly the kind of vast, formal, constraint-driven reformulation that the coming generation of mathematical artificial intelligence may be able to carry out, as large language models begin to dominate formal mathematics. The PVT does not merely diagnose the wound. It specifies, precisely, the reconstruction — and it may be that the reconstruction is finally within reach of the tools now arriving.

What the theory does, and does not, claim

A final word, because the PVT's modesty is part of its strength. It does not claim to model nature, to know the diameter of the universe, or to settle whether space is infinitely divisible. It hands those questions back to philosophy and theology, where they belong. The PVT claims only to model the measurement — the honest, finite relation between an observer and what is observed.

But that modesty carries one consequence it cannot escape. A measurement does not happen by itself; it must be initiated, by something that chooses to compare one thing with another. A theory of measurement must therefore decide, at its very root, between a dead universe and a living one — and of the two unprovable axioms, only one is coherent, because a dead universe cannot say how the living act of measuring could ever arise within it.

That is why the theory is called panvitalist. Not because life is sprinkled over matter, but because measurement — the act on which all of physics depends — has no coherent home except in a living whole.

The full paper, Ontological Foundations of the Panvitalistic Theory  ( View or Download full Paper on Zenodo), is written for readers new to the theory and assumes no mathematics. It is the clearest single entry point to a programme that asks one demanding question: are we willing to build the foundation right?