By Bryan Thompson
What we see is not all that exists - it is what has already become real.
Modern physics offers an extraordinarily successful description of the universe through light, matter, and geometry. Telescopes map galaxies across billions of light-years. Particle accelerators probe the smallest constituents of matter. General relativity explains the motion of planets, stars, and light itself. Yet beneath this familiar picture lies a quieter question that physics rarely pauses to examine:
How does reality become real at all?
The Physics of Becoming invites the reader to reconsider the visible universe from a simple but profound perspective: everything we observe is the outcome of a physical process that converts possibility into structure, unfolding at a finite rate. Light is not merely illumination. It is the record of what has already occurred.
Grounded entirely in established physics - the Standard Model, cosmology, and general relativity - this book reframes the universe as an ongoing process rather than a static thing. Without equations or speculation, it explores how collapse, structure formation, and observation shape the world we see, and why the observable universe is necessarily incomplete.
Readers are guided through the universe as physics actually encounters it:
photons traveling across expanding space, matter emerging from fields, curvature recording cosmic history, and structure accumulating over time. Along the way, collapse is treated not as a philosophical abstraction, but as a physical mechanism with consequences for time, memory, and the evolution of the cosmos.
It shows - patiently and carefully - how the visible universe can be understood as the realized layer of a deeper informational process. The result is a picture of reality that feels less mysterious, more physical, and more inevitable.
By the final chapters, the reader is left with questions that arise naturally, not artificially:
If light records what has become real, what remains unseen?
If structure stores history, where is that history held?
If reality unfolds at a finite rate, what is time?
The Physics of Becoming stands alone as a complete work of scientific perspective, it requires no continuation to be meaningful. Readers who go no further will still walk away with a coherent, grounded understanding of the universe as a process of becoming - written with clarity, restraint, and respect for the physics that already works.