Why RST Feels Obvious Only After You’ve Seen It

Why RST Feels Obvious Only After You’ve Seen It

Reactive Substrate Theory is rarely rejected on technical grounds. Instead, it is often met with the reaction: “Yes — of course. Why did this need to be said?”

That reaction is itself diagnostic.

RST does not introduce exotic mechanisms, hidden variables, or speculative entities. It articulates constraints that physicists already respect in practice but rarely enforce explicitly at the level of interpretation.

Before encountering RST, most researchers implicitly manage these constraints locally: they qualify statements in papers, they hedge in talks, they retreat to “just a model” when pressed.

What RST does — and why it feels obvious in hindsight — is make those local maneuvers global and explicit.

1. RST Names a Habit, Not a Discovery

Most physicists already know the following:

  • a mathematical object can outrun its physical interpretation,
  • a useful parameter need not correspond to a physical entity,
  • “in principle” reversibility often means “never, physically.”

RST does not teach these lessons. It systematizes them.

Once seen, it becomes hard not to notice how often interpretive slides are tolerated simply because everyone has learned to live with them.

2. Why It Rarely Appears in Textbooks

Textbooks teach formalisms, not interpretive hygiene.

Students learn:

  • how to calculate,
  • how to apply equations,
  • how to reproduce standard results.

They are rarely taught how to distinguish:

  • what is written,
  • what is measured, and
  • what is merely inferred.

RST enters precisely at this missing layer. When that layer is restored, much that felt mysterious becomes banal — and much that felt profound is revealed as rhetorical compression.

3. Obviousness as a Late-Stage Signal

Ideas that feel obvious only after articulation are often doing one of two things:

  • making an implicit norm explicit, or
  • removing an unexamined assumption.

RST does both.

Its “obviousness” is not triviality; it is the mark of a constraint that was always operating tacitly and is now visible.

Closing Thought

RST feels obvious only after you have seen the assumptions it forbids. Before that, those assumptions feel like background noise.

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