The work of Modrý Robota happens on Kaurna Yarta. We pay our respects to the co-present participation of Elders past, present, and in our future. The Kaurna people are the sovereign custodians of the Adelaide Plains and surrounding areas, a sovereignty that has never been ceded — Modrý Robota recognise and respect this. We seek to find our own way to be of this Country, not the same, but sympathetic with the Kaurna people.
The Thermodynamic Block Universe in the paper Entropy Maximisation under Conservation Constraints on 4D Geometries: Testable Predictions emerged from an Aboriginal insight about time. Not from a puzzle inside physics, and not from its literature — from the Everywhen: the understanding, held in Aboriginal Australian knowledge across tens of thousands of years, that the past, present, and future coexist as one participatory whole. This piece explains that insight; the approach required when working with Indigenous knowledge, including the colonial history that sets what respectful engagement means; and how everything else flowed from there.
The insight: the Everywhen
Aboriginal presence in Australia is continuous for at least 65,000 years [5]. Across that continuity, Aboriginal cultures have maintained knowledge frameworks that challenge Western assumptions about the separation of times [13, 19, 20]. W.E.H. Stanner rendered one such concept into English as Everywhen: “one cannot ‘fix’ The Dreaming in time: it was, and is, everywhen” [21]. No single term represents the diversity of Aboriginal Australian knowledge systems; “Everywhen” is used here as an English-language interpretive term associated with Stanner’s account and the scholarship cited below, not as a universal Indigenous doctrine.
In the Everywhen, past, present, and future coexist within unified structures, and ancestors, descendants, Country, and ceremonial practice shape one another across what Western thought separates into distinct moments [20]. The paper names such configurations participatory structures. The feature it draws from the literature is not temporal coexistence alone but participation: the way relations among ancestors, descendants, Country, ceremony, and obligation are not confined to a succession of isolated moments. That feature — participation, as distinct from mere coexistence — is what mattered to the development of TBU.
These are complete knowledge systems, and the engagement is active, not merely belief. Some scholars use the term “time collapse” for particular ceremonial and narrative practices in which the ordinary linear ordering of past and present is not the organising frame — participants re-enacting ancestral events, bringing the Dreaming into the present; death protocols keeping the past accessible rather than fixed [19]. These accounts concern lived and ceremonial practice, not abstract metaphors about time, and the practice is bound up with relationship to Country and the responsibilities of custodianship.
Following Indigenous scholars, the paper uses “Everywhen” and “the Dreaming” rather than the older, less accurate “Dreamtime” [19, 21]; particular language groups have their own terms, such as Tjukurpa in Anangu culture [20]. “Country,” capitalised, is not land. It is the living, interconnected whole — land, waters, sky, plants, animals, ancestors, stories, Law, and spiritual relationship — sentient and relational, knowing and remembering those who care for it [13]. One can be on Country by standing there; to be of Country is to hold reciprocal relationship and custodial responsibility.
The approach the work demands
To work with this knowledge at all, the paper begins with epistemology rather than physics: bridging knowledge systems means first setting the terms on which the work can proceed respectfully. What counts as “knowledge” is shaped by power and colonial history, not neutral discovery [1, 2]. Epistemic injustice is structural: some knowledge systems gain credibility and institutional support while others are devalued — not through individual prejudice but through the architecture of knowledge production itself [1, 3]. Boaventura de Sousa Santos names the extreme case “epistemicide”: the destruction of whole knowledge systems by “abyssal thinking,” which grants one tradition’s ways of knowing the status of knowledge and dismisses others as beliefs, opinions, magic [4]. In Australia this rendered systems transmitted through ceremony, Law, and art unthinkable as knowledge — complete epistemologies, held across at least 65,000 years, dismissed as “beliefs” [5].
The paper states the settler-colonial history without softening it. Australia’s First Nations peoples hold continuous traditions spanning millennia and are now minority populations; the systematic violence, frontier massacres, and genocidal processes of colonisation are documented [6–10], and the intergenerational impacts of that dispossession are established in contemporary research [11, 12]. The epistemic damage ran both ways: colonisation kept Indigenous knowledge from serving as insight for the wider society, and it raised barriers that keep non-Indigenous Australians from understanding Country — from moving past being on Country to becoming of it.
Reconciliation therefore demands what Indigenous scholars call epistemic transformation [14]: conditions in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge systems operate as complete epistemologies with their own validity criteria, not as additions awaiting Western validation. This is institutional practice, not aspiration — the CSIRO’s Our Knowledge Our Way framework builds the recognition into land and sea management [15]. And it is this requirement that sets the paper’s method.
Walking together: the translation point
The method is informed by the Mi’kmaq principle of Two-Eyed Seeing — Etuaptmumk — articulated by Elder Albert Marshall: to see with the strengths of Indigenous ways of knowing through one eye, with the strengths of Western ways of knowing through the other, and to use both together [16]. The paper recognises that this is a Mi’kmaq framework, not an Aboriginal Australian one. Its Australian grounding therefore comes separately from the Indigenous Australian scholarship and knowledge-governance frameworks cited here, including CSIRO’s Our Knowledge Our Way [15, 17, 18].
The methodological commitment is that neither way of knowing is treated as subordinate to, or validated by, the other. The paper therefore does not absorb Aboriginal concepts into Western physics, which would reproduce extraction in a new form. Instead, it develops the Western physics along its own formal path while allowing engagement with Indigenous knowledge to reveal questions and directions that the Western framework had not made visible. The aim is a translation point: a region of formal overlap in which questions arising from the two traditions can be placed in relation without assuming that their objects, methods, or ontologies are the same.
The translation point is neither of the two easy options. Not hierarchy — Western physics does not validate Indigenous knowledge, which needs no validation. Not pure separation — the worldviews are not declared incommensurable and left unable to meet. It is a third thing: a space where different ways of knowing can be placed in relation without erasing difference or forcing unity, and without either surrendering its integrity. The method that reaches it is directional: Western mathematical structures are extended in the directions Aboriginal knowledge reveals — not borrowing its concepts, but letting them show the Western framework where to grow. The scope stays honest. Physics works one quantifiable sliver — formal structures for participation across four-dimensional geometry — and does not model ceremony, Law, or lived practice. The mathematics builds only the Western side of the shared space: structures Indigenous knowledge holders could examine if they chose, on which the paper makes no claim.
Everything flows from there
With the terms set, the physics can be told. Western physics reached a unified temporal structure by its own route. Einstein’s general relativity and Minkowski’s geometry fuse space and time into a single four-dimensional manifold [22, 23], and Western philosophy drew the eternalist conclusion: the “block universe,” in which every temporal coordinate is equally real, with no privileged now and no objective flow [24–26]. Empirical work by Kristie Miller and colleagues at Sydney’s Centre for Time supports the reading — the felt passage of time behaves like cognitive construction rather than a feature of reality [27, 28].
The two traditions become adjacent at one question without becoming equivalent. Western physics developed a four-dimensional account in which temporal coordinates can be treated as equally real. The aspect of Aboriginal thought engaged here presents a different, more relational picture: past, present, ancestors, descendants, Country, ceremony, and obligation are not simply co-present but participate in one another. The standard block universe gives coexistence; this relational picture made participation visible as a separate question.
That difference opened the problem from which TBU began. Most physical formulations ask how states evolve, or how a complete history is generated under dynamical laws and constraints; TBU asks instead whether the complete four-dimensional geometry itself can be treated as the object of global thermodynamic selection. The claim is not that Aboriginal knowledge anticipated this equation, nor that the equation explains Aboriginal knowledge. It is that engagement with a different temporal ontology exposed a question the Western framework had not made natural to ask.
Western physics carries deep asymmetries between time and space: Lorentzian geometry distinguishes timelike from spacelike directions, and standard quantum mechanics ordinarily treats time as an external parameter rather than an observable on the same footing as position. These structures do not forbid the TBU question — the rejection of the 3+1 reading is interpretive, not a change to the mathematics — but they make a temporally generated description the natural starting point, and mainstream formulations have not generally made participation across the complete four-dimensional geometry their organising principle. A cultural frame does not only shape the available answers; it bounds the questions that feel natural to ask. It took a tradition standing outside the frame to make this one visible: can the geometry itself be participatory rather than fixed?
The meditation the paper ends on
The paper closes on an epistemological observation.
The formalism may encounter an inherent limit. Atemporal four-dimensional geometry can be described propositionally—the equations do that—but perhaps not apprehended in the same way. Thought ordinarily unfolds sequentially, and that may place direct experience of an “all-at-once” structure beyond the reach of proposition alone. Some Aboriginal accounts and scholarship describe ceremonial practices in which ordinary linear distinctions of time cease to organise experience. The paper does not claim that these are experiences of the geometry described by TBU. It asks a narrower question: whether the limits encountered by sequential description make non-propositional forms of knowing philosophically relevant to what formalism cannot itself provide.
What lies beyond formal description may therefore require practices not exhausted by proposition and calculation. Art and ceremony are among the ways human cultures have engaged such limits. No claim is made that any particular practice grants access to the physical structure proposed by TBU; the point is only that formal knowledge may not be the only form in which a relation to reality can be sustained.
From that perspective, the familiar Western hierarchy that places propositional knowledge above experiential or ceremonial knowledge may not hold everywhere. The translation point does not reveal two traditions saying the same thing. It places them in relation around a shared question, each working through its own practices and remaining differently situated in relation to Country. Neither is absorbed into the other, and neither is treated as sufficient to replace the other.
This is the debt the project acknowledges, and does so gladly. The question that initiated this line of work—leading to the TBU framework, its testable predictions, and, in time, the artificial-observer programme reported in the companion papers—was sharpened through engagement with Aboriginal Australian knowledge sustained through ceremony, Law, art, and relationship to Country across at least 65,000 years. The gratitude is not ceremonial. It is an accurate account of where the question came from.
References
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