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Leibniz (1646–1716) rejects absolute space entirely — space is not a container, it is the ordering of things that coexist. No space without things. A relational view, but without a mathematical theory it remains scientifically inert. It would take another 200 years.
Maxwell (1865) unifies electricity, magnetism, and light into a single framework of fields and waves. The source of the classical triumph — and its undoing. His equations predict a fixed speed of light and the ultraviolet catastrophe.
Planck resolves the catastrophe: energy comes in discrete packets. Einstein extends it: light itself comes in quanta, and builds relativity — space and time coupled, gravity as geometry. De Broglie turns it around: particles behave as waves.
Heisenberg (1927) — position and momentum cannot both be definite. Not a limit of instruments, a feature of nature. Born — the wave function gives probabilities, not certainties. Classical mechanics tells you what is there. Quantum mechanics tells you what you will find if you look.
The impasse. Bohr offers complementarity. Bohm restores determinism through hidden variables at the cost of non-locality. Everett proposes all outcomes happen in branching worlds. No consensus.
Bell (1964) shows quantum correlations violate any classical, locally deterministic picture. Aspect (1982) and others confirm it experimentally — loopholes closed by 2015, Nobel Prize 2022. Nature does not behave classically. Separability fails.
Rovelli (1996) takes what the physics says and drops the artificial observer status. The observer is any physical system. Properties are facts established through interaction. Drop observer-independent facts, and the paradoxes dissolve.
The connection to loop quantum gravity — where spacetime itself is quantised and relational, with no fixed background — is natural. If spacetime is relational, quantum states should be too.
Growth. A small community: Laudisa, Smerlak, Bitbol. The SEP entry (2002) gave institutional recognition. In 2010, van Fraassen published “Rovelli’s World” — identifying the central challenge: if facts are relative, what connects different observers’ accounts?
Decoherence as mechanism. Early RQM stated the principle: facts are relative. Maturation came through decoherence — the physical process producing stable, shared facts from relational ones. Di Biagio and Rovelli (2021) introduced stable facts — facts whose relativity can be ignored. The classical world is the world of stable facts. But decoherence is itself relational.
Frauchiger-Renner (2018) sharpened everything. Three assumptions cannot all hold: QM applies universally, measurements produce single outcomes, reasoning transfers between agents. RQM keeps the physics universal and outcomes single — but facts transfer only where decoherence anchors them into a shared context.
If the seed holds: where it says “language is the medium through which a subject experiences reality,” RQM says properties manifest only through interaction. Where it says “knowledge is convergence of subjects,” RQM says shared facts through decoherence. Where it says “subject is a role in the relation,” RQM says the observer is any physical system. Different vocabulary, same structural move. Independent arrivals at the same structure.
The science trajectory mirrors the philosophy trajectory. In philosophy: the outside view giving way to the relational, from Descartes through Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, to Wittgenstein, Rorty, Merleau-Ponty. In science: the absolute giving way to the relational, from Newton through Maxwell, Einstein, quantum mechanics, to RQM.
Physics and philosophy, working independently on different problems with different methods, arrive at the same structural observation: there is no outside view. Properties, facts, knowledge — all relational, all from a position, all through a medium.
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