Absurd Resolution And The Limits Of Cosmology

I have been thinking a lot this year about how much of cosmology is actually observation… and how much of it is disciplined storytelling.

It started with something simple. Does the night sky change if you move a few hundred miles? The honest answer is basically no. Stars are so far away that even large movements on Earth mean nothing. The only real change comes from Earth’s motion as a whole… rotation, orbit, galactic drift. At human scale, we don’t matter.

That realization snowballs.

We like to imagine the universe as something we watch. In reality, we never observe motion directly at cosmic scales. We infer it. Every photon we receive is delayed. Every object is seen at a different time. There is no frame-by-frame movie of the universe unfolding. There is only a muddy painting assembled from light fossils. What we call cosmology is already closer to phenomenology than physics in the classical sense… a careful accounting of appearances constrained by perspective, delay, and relation.

Cosmology, at its core, is the constrained reconstruction of that painting. We take incomplete, time-smeared observations and tell the least dishonest story that fits all of them at once. The rules are strict… internal consistency, predictive power, minimal assumptions. But it is still a story. A very disciplined one.

The one redeeming bit of honesty in this process is math.

Math never claims truth. It says “if these assumptions hold, then these consequences follow.” It exposes hidden assumptions. It punishes hand-waving. It refuses cheap lies. When observations break a theory, the math doesn’t bend. The narrative does.

For a long time, our tools were crude enough that this worked beautifully. Take redshift.

Redshift was not just a clever measurement trick. It was a genuine conceptual breakthrough. It gave us the first reliable way to relate light to motion, distance, and time at cosmic scale. By measuring how spectral lines stretch, we learned that the universe is not static. We learned that galaxies are receding, that space itself appears to be expanding, and that motion could be inferred even when direct observation was impossible.

More importantly, redshift gave us a foundation for understanding motion in a universe where nothing can be watched directly. It allowed us to replace intuition with inference. Motion became something you could calculate rather than see. Distance became something you could estimate rather than guess. Entire structures of cosmology were built on this single insight, and for a long time, it worked extraordinarily well.

But redshift only works cleanly when the path light travels can be treated as simple.

Light from nearby galaxies moves through relatively tame spacetime. Gravitational effects are small. Lensing is limited. Assumptions about smoothness mostly hold. In that regime, redshift behaves like an honest proxy. It compresses complexity without distorting it too badly.

At extreme distance, that bargain collapses.

Light that has traveled billions of light-years does not arrive untouched. It passes through an unknowable sequence of gravitational wells, evolving mass distributions, curved spacetime, and time-dependent potentials. It is bent, delayed, stretched, and redirected. By the time it reaches us, the redshift we measure encodes a long and irreducibly complex history.

At that point, we no longer know exactly what the light is telling us. We know something happened to it. We do not know how much of that signal comes from expansion, how much from gravity, how much from lensing, or how much from structures we cannot fully model.

This is not because redshift is wrong. It is because it is being asked to explain more than it was designed to carry.

What makes this moment unusual is that observation is now ahead of explanation. Instrumentation has sprinted forward while theory jogs behind, adding parameters and caveats to keep old frameworks standing. Bad ideas are not being gently revised… they are being tossed onto the heap.

Naturally, the instinct is to build the next James Webb. Bigger mirror. Better sensitivity. More pixels.

But here is the uncomfortable thought. From a single vantage point, sharper vision eventually stops helping. No matter how powerful the telescope, we still sit on one planet, in one orbit, inside one light cone. We only ever see a single projection of a four-dimensional universe.

So how far away would we need to place another telescope for it to matter?

What I really mean by that question is this: how far would we need to separate our instruments to even begin to approximate something like a frame‑by‑frame understanding of the universe. Not sharper images. Not deeper sensitivity. Actual temporal leverage. The ability to compare states in a way that feels even vaguely cinematic, rather than archaeological.

Inside the solar system… meaningless for cosmology.

Even this framing quietly assumes something deeply suspect: that a frame‑by‑frame universe exists in any coherent sense at all. To want sequential frames is to smuggle in the idea of a global, constant time against which those frames could be ordered. But relativity already tells us that no such universal clock exists. Time is local, conditional, and observer‑dependent.

So the very intuition driving the question runs into trouble immediately. We are asking for a movie of a universe that does not supply a shared timeline. Space is hard enough. Time makes the entire question borderline ludicrous before we even get to engineering. Even hundreds of astronomical units buys you almost nothing in terms of disentangling light paths or redshift causes. At interstellar distances, you gain some leverage, but not what intuition hopes for. You still cannot see motion directly. You still observe delayed histories, not simultaneous states.

Push the detectors far enough apart to be truly useful, and another limit appears. Communication time. Causality. Each observatory inhabits its own causal diamond. By the time they share information, the states they compare are no longer co-temporal. You do not get a unified picture… you get relational fragments.

This is where relativity stops being abstract and starts being brutal.

There is no global “now.” No master frame. No way to stitch perspectives together without destroying simultaneity. The very separation that gives epistemic leverage erases the shared present.

A relational, Einsteinian Schrödinger’s cat.

Layer on top of that the fact that we only ever observe a small, biased portion of an unknowable whole, and something clicks.

This is not just an abstract limitation. It is built into the structure of the universe itself. Imagine getting into a spaceship and accelerating away from Earth. For a while, nothing dramatic happens. Earth gets smaller. The sky looks familiar. But if you travel far enough, for long enough, a strange boundary emerges. There are regions of the universe you can see but can never reach, and regions you can reach but can never return from.

This is the beginning of what we mean by the observable universe and its event horizon. It is not a wall in space. It is a wall in epistemology. The boundary is not made of matter or force, but of what can be known, what can be influenced, and what can ever be verified.

It is set by the expansion of spacetime and the finite speed of light. Beyond that horizon, events can occur that will never, even in principle, influence you. No signal, no light, no information can make the journey back. So when we talk about observing only a portion of the universe, we mean something very literal. There are parts of reality that are causally disconnected from us forever. Not hidden. Not unmeasured. Fundamentally unreachable. Cosmology is not marching toward a final picture. It is mapping the boundaries of what can be said without lying.

That does not make it useless. It makes it humbler.

We can describe the observable universe statistically and locally, under stated assumptions. We can build models that predict future observations inside our light cone. But we cannot, even in principle, access the totality, its global state, or its absolute dynamics. Motion, at this scale, is never something we watch unfold. It is a relational inference, extracted from delayed signals and model assumptions, not a primitive fact handed to us by the universe.

Once you accept that, the grand narrative impulse fades. What remains is closer to phenomenology with math than cosmic storytelling.

I should be clear about what this leaves me with, because it would be easy to mistake everything above for resignation.

I feel about cosmology much the way Friedrich Nietzsche felt about metaphysics, but the parallel is more precise than simple disillusionment. Metaphysics failed Nietzsche not because it asked bad questions, but because it relied on a structure that was never actually there. A subject standing apart from the world, peering behind appearances to discover a deeper, truer reality. A world behind the world.

Nietzsche saw that this structure collapses under scrutiny. There is no privileged vantage point outside life from which value, meaning, or morality can be derived. There is only lived experience, interpretation, perspective. Phenomena all the way down.

Cosmology, at its most ambitious, makes a similar mistake. It tempts us with the idea that the universe, if observed carefully enough, will eventually disclose its final story. That behind the data lies a definitive account of how it all began, where it is going, and what it ultimately means. But when I look honestly at what cosmology gives us, I do not see a hidden world revealed. I see a muddy map. And when I look past the map to the universe itself, all I see is phenomenology.

The universe does not present itself as an object with a knowable interior narrative. It presents itself as appearances constrained by perspective, light cones, and causal limits. There is no cosmic subject-object split waiting to be resolved. There is only what shows up, when and where it can.

Nietzsche abandoned metaphysics because he recognized that there was no way back to certainty without self-deception. Cosmology has brought me to the same threshold. The failure is not empirical. It is structural. The universe will not step outside itself to explain itself to us.

Nietzsche’s response was not nihilism, but creation. The idea of the Übermensch was not a blueprint or a prophecy. It was a stance. A way of living that holds knowledge and uncertainty together without appealing to a hidden order. He never claimed to be that figure himself. By his own admission, he was guessing. But he understood the choice clearly. It was either despair or hope.

He chose hope. So will I.

For Nietzsche, that hope was placed in emerging ways of understanding the human condition… psychology, sociology, and the sciences of lived experience. I find myself in a similar position. For all I have said here, science still has enormous work to do. Not at the unreachable edges of the universe, but close to home. Our planet. Our solar system. Our local galaxy. Systems we can touch, test, revisit, and correct.

Nietzsche said, in effect, put away your metaphysics. I find myself saying something similar now. Put away your cosmology, at least as a source of ultimate meaning. We both have better things for you to think about.

Existentialism, it turns out, was never just about morality. It was always the larger tent.

Absurd resolution did not make the universe clearer. It made our epistemic boundaries visible. Not boundaries in space, but boundaries in knowledge.

I can already imagine how professional physicists would respond to everything I’ve written here. Some would bristle and say this is philosophy, not physics. Others would quietly agree, admitting over coffee that the public story oversells what the field can actually deliver. A few would recognize the position immediately: not an attack on cosmology, but an acknowledgment of where its explanatory power stops and where something else has to take over.

And that is the point I want to be clear about. This is not an argument against cosmology, nor is it an attempt to outshine the scientists who have devoted their lives to it. They are doing real work, difficult work, and work that still matters. My argument is far more modest and far more personal.

The question I am answering here is not what cosmology can explain, but how much of my own finite attention and meaning-making I am willing to continue to invest in it. I am not closing doors for others. I am not declaring the field empty. I am simply acknowledging that I have taken this pursuit as far as it can take me.

For my purposes, cosmology has done its job. It has shown me a universe without guarantees, without a hidden narrative, without a world behind the world. It has clarified the limits of what can be known from inside the system. That clarity is not nothing. It is just not everything.

I should also be clear about something that might sound contradictory given everything I’ve said.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the greatest achievement of humankind. Full stop.

We should surpass it. Absolutely.

But perhaps not by building another telescope that looks even farther outward. Perhaps the next leap is something more local, more grounded, and far harder to do. Something that turns the same rigor, creativity, and collective effort inward… toward our planet, our biology, our societies, our minds. Toward systems where feedback is possible, where causality can be tested, and where understanding can still meaningfully change how we live.

Cosmology has given me awe, humility, and clarity about limits. I am grateful for that. But meaning, for me, will be built closer to home.

And that, paradoxically, may be the most honest picture I am ever going to get.