The history of knowledge almost always proceeds from detail to overview. One starts with a theorem, then another, then yet another, hoping that the sum of local truths will generate a global truth.
But every now and then, on rare occasions, the reverse happens: an intuition appears already complete, as if it had descended from above. Not as a result, but as evidence. Not as a destination, but as a starting point.
Ramanujan and emergent thinking
Srinivasa Ramanujan belonged to this category. His formulas were not the fruit of a path; they were local manifestations of a structure already present, already formed, already real, a structure that he perceived before it could be proven.
Mathematics, for Ramanujan, was not a building to be constructed, but an organism to be revealed. Identities were not discoveries: they were resurfacings. Numbers were not symbols: they were imprints of a greater coherence.
This way of thinking, often dismissed as "intuition" or "mystical genius" by those who cannot escape formalism, is actually a perfect example of emergent thinking. First the whole, then the parts. First the constraint, then the form. First the global structure, then the details that embody it.
Common Relativity
This same dynamic is at the heart of Common Relativity. Not a physics built piece by piece, but a physics that descends from the global constraint: cosmic time t, increasing entropy, informational coherence, ontological hierarchy, the aggregation constant that prevents matter from dissolving into impossible singularities.
In CR, as in Ramanujan, what governs phenomena does not arise from the parts: it arises from the whole that gives them meaning. The universe is not a collection of objects; it is a coherent structure from which objects emerge as local configurations. It is not the numbers that create the formula: it is the formula that makes the numbers possible.
The vice of reductionism
The modern world, however, has inherited an ancient vice: believing that reality can be reduced. Reducing gravity to an equation, matter to a wave function, time to a reversible coordinate, information to an idealized superposition.
In this reductionism, physics has lost its horizon, chasing perfect symmetries that the cosmos does not possess and ignoring the directionality imposed by entropy, by time, by the coherence that binds what exists.
Ramanujan had already shown that there are no neutral structures: every identity, every numerical relation, is the reflection of a deeper force, of an order that is not local but global.
The foundation
This book is born from that awareness. From the recognition that structure precedes form. That emergence is real. That the cosmic constraint is not an addition, but the foundation. That physics and mathematics share the same destiny: to be seen for what they are, not for what we pretend them to be.
It is not about breaking formalism, but about liberating it. Not about demolishing science, but about restoring what it has forgotten: the link between local and global, between dynamics and constraint, between number and structure, between part and whole.
What Ramanujan intuited in numbers, Common Relativity makes manifest in physics: reality does not emerge from its components, but from the constraints that allow the components to exist.
A new point of view
This is the preface to a book that does not add a chapter to the history of physics: it overturns it. That does not offer a new result, but a new point of view. That does not aim to change equations, but to change what the equations mean. That does not propose a new fragment of the world, but a new image of the whole.
Those who see only the formula see the surface. Those who see the structure see the real.
And this book is dedicated to those who want to see.