Physics, and science as a whole, attempts to paint an objective picture of reality. Consciousness, experience, and subjectivity are forcibly pushed out of this picture. Even where science is empirical, this empiricism rarely involves a consideration of human consciousness, but rather the readings of some mechanical measuring device, or some hypothetical abstracted sum of all perspectives – a God's eye view or view from nowhere. But phenomenologist of science Harald A. Wiltsche paints a different picture. Physics, even in the form of quantum mechanics, has its origins in the phenomenology of human consciousness. No matter how hard scientists try, it can never escape those origins, and to truly move forward, it must understand and embrace them.

Physics and phenomenology are usually taken to inhabit different worlds. Physics aims at a description of objective reality in mathematical terms. Phenomenology—the philosophical movement inaugurated by Edmund Husserl—is an a priori investigation into consciousness and into the ways things appear in experience. Physics deals with equations, invariants, and symmetries, aiming to represent reality minus observers; phenomenology seems to concern precisely what physics leaves out: subjectivity, consciousness, meaning. If the two meet at all, it is only in polite, but ultimately inconsequential, interdisciplinary dialogue.

My claim is that this picture is mistaken. Physics does not stand outside phenomenology. It presupposes the very structures phenomenology seeks to analyse—above all, the structured correlation between subject and object through which objectivity first becomes intelligible. The task, therefore, is not to unite two distant domains, but to recognize a relation that has been there from the beginning.

To make this more tangible, consider what physics means by objectivity. Contrary to the image sometimes promoted in popular science—objectivity as detachment from all observers—in spacetime physics, objectivity is defined by invariance across observers. A physical description is deemed objective if it holds regardless of the coordinate frame in which it is expressed.

Introductory physics courses teach this as a technical lesson. We choose a coordinate system to describe a physical system. We then learn that the laws governing the behaviour of physical systems must remain valid under transformations from one frame to another. We are introduced to Galilean transformations in classical mechanics, where time is absolute, and to Lorentz transformations in special relativity, where space and time mix but the speed of light remains invariant. These allow us to shift, rotate, or boost coordinate frames relative to one another. Certain features—such as a point’s distance from the origin—change under these transformations, while others—such as the separation between points—remain invariant. It is only the latter that we treat as objective. Objectivity is thus secured not by eliminating perspective, but by relating perspectives through transformation rules.

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Scientific cognition, however sophisticated, remains grounded in the structures through which objectivity is first constituted in experience.

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Compare this with how phenomenology describes perceptual objectivity. When I perceive a coffee cup, only one side of it is sensuously given at any particular moment—the side currently facing me. Yet my experience is not limited to this fragment. Co-given with what is actually seen are anticipations of how the cup would appear were I to move: that it has a similarly coloured rearside, that it would present a handle from another angle, that it would remain the same object as I change position.