Abstract
The most severely misleading of our basic physical assumptions is a tacitly held *direct realism* and its way of *physical actualization* of future. It makes quantum mechanics (QM) incomprehensible and lets relativity theory impose a ‘block universe’ in spite of QM. Under *tautological modal realism*, which is based on trivial truths, QM appears naturally. Tautological modal realism belongs to the fundamental theory of totality by definition. Indeterminism emerges inside determined totality. Adding special relativity, demands Everett relativity, which conceivably could have become obvious to Einstein almost a century ago, if he had only further doubted his brand of realism. None of this is yet QM! Wheeler’s “utterly simple idea” demands certain correlations between alternative possibilities, namely those that force *modal realism* into physics; this is the core of QM. Actualization cannot be contained and spreads to all possible ‘worlds’. Visually intuitive models can illustrate these concepts, much like Minkowski diagrams resolve the twin paradox. Apparent non-locality in the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox is suddenly as simple as the fact that twins have different ages after they aged differently (on separate space-time paths). With QM becoming self-evident, later generations, as usual, hardly grasp what the hang-up was, because they utilize improved language. This generally defines paradigm shifts, which can never be consistently expressed in the previous terminology. However, this is especially relevant today: With realism being suspect, fundamental physics is mainly (not merely) a description (of itself, not presupposed reality). Wittgenstein’s core insight is crucial; universal limits of language limit the universe.
Sascha Vongehr