Ontology in Physics - Why Physics Needs an Ontological Layer and an Ontological Machine

This essay argues that twenty-first-century physics is caught in a paradox: unprecedented technological triumph alongside structural stagnation in its most fundamental questions. It traces that stagnation to a missing ontological layer — the question of what the mathematical structures of our effective theories are actually descriptions of — and distinguishes it from the ontological machine: the single dynamics of a single substrate that generates different effective theories as limiting cases,