What if conversations create gravitational fields where separate consciousnesses briefly merge? Perhaps being truly understood is physics-defying—a small miracle of human connection, a brief victory over time itself.
What can physics—particularly quantum physics—add to our understanding of human conversations and relationships? I propose to explore connections between conceptual worlds that might initially seem unrelated, finding unexpected resonance between the laws that govern the universe and the vicissitudes of human connection.
When we speak of meaningful conversation, we use language that echoes physics: “We were on the same wavelength,” “There was chemistry between us,” “She has a magnetic personality,” “That conversation had gravitas.” This linguistic overlap suggests an intuitive recognition of deeper patterns connecting the physical and interpersonal realms. Perhaps the principles governing stars and atoms might illuminate something essential about how minds connect across the void of individual consciousness. Of course, this is pure speculation, result of a reflective ambulation.
In his book “The Order of Time”, Carlo Rovelli introduces an idea that helps us navigate this interdisciplinary terrain: the world isn’t explained through things; the world isn’t made of things. Rather, the world is explained by and composed of events—occurrences, happenings.
Even what we consider a thing—a rock, for instance—is actually an event. However, it’s an event that unfolds across a timespan vastly exceeding a human lifetime, making it difficult for us to conceptualize it as such. We humans naturally struggle to consider what we cannot directly see or experience. With rocks, we’re dealing with what archaeologist João Muralha calls “the long time”—the vast temporal scale used in historical analysis and archaeological work. Through conversations with Muralha, I came to understand that comprehending the impact of Paleolithic human occupation on a particular geography requires a temporal analysis spanning tens of thousands of years, well beyond our everyday conception of history.
This same principle applies, with even greater magnitudes, when studying our planet, and more dramatically still when examining other celestial bodies. To understand certain phenomena, we must reconsider, reformulate, and reconstruct our accustomed conception of time. Ultimately, every rock will become dust, as will everything else.
Our cherished—and for some, essential—idea of permanence doesn’t allow for a deeper, more complete understanding of the world and ourselves. The ontological habit of perceiving, feeling, and thinking about the world as consisting of constant, static, and linear things is so encrusted within us, so transparent - in Heidegger’s sense of being invisible because it is always already present in our way of being-in-the-world -, that it hinders access to understanding the world as it “really” seems to be: constant and permanent change.
There are other types of events where this way of thinking—derived from physics, certain philosophical traditions, and aspects of psychology—appears particularly apt. I believe conversation is one such event. To understand a conversation, it’s insufficient to refer merely to what it was—the spatial circumstances and context, the linguistic acts that occurred. It’s equally insufficient to ask when it happened. To comprehend it completely, we must consider this event in its totality and complexity, beyond its space and time, never excluding the subjective immensity of its participants.
What allows us to understand a conversation is the change participants imprint upon it and the change it leaves within them—the ideas awakened, modified, and created; the feelings perceived and those that went unnoticed.
Consider a conversation that fundamentally altered your perspective on something important. Years later, what remains? Not always do we remember the exact words spoken or the precise location. What endures is the transformation itself—how your thinking changed, how your emotional landscape shifted. The “event” of that conversation continues to unfold across your lifetime, rippling outward into other conversations, decisions, and relationships. Like a supernova whose light reaches us years after the star’s explosion, the meaning of significant conversations often reveals itself long after the words themselves have faded from memory, or consciousness.
When we conceptualize conversations as events rather than things, we free ourselves from the artificial boundaries of beginning and end. The pre-conversation—all that came before, all that made the participants who they were in that moment—becomes as integral as what was actually said. Similarly, the post-conversation—how the interaction continues to evolve in memory and influence—becomes part of the conversation itself. The words exchanged become merely the visible portion of a much larger invisible reality, like the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
To proceed, we must explore the association between time and gravity. Rovelli elegantly explains the “mind-bending” effect that films like Interstellar and Tenet leave on laypeople like myself, even after multiple viewings. I won’t venture to explain this relationship comprehensively—I would be far out of my depth in currents where Einstein was among the first to swim.
One example I retained concerns time’s velocity: time literally (not just perceptually) moves slower in some places than others. For instance, time passes faster for someone living in the mountains than for someone living by the sea. Thanks to Einstein, we all nominally know that time is relative, but I’m not certain we all understand time’s various relativities.
A conversation, in principle, happens when two or more people coincide in time. We might say, therefore, that a conversation happens “now.” But if time is relative, what does “now” mean for these people? And is this “now” the same for everyone involved? This is where relativity connects with a concept from psychology and particularly psychoanalysis: intersubjectivity.
Imagine a conversation with three participants. Two engage actively, consciously, and willingly, while the third is “not there,” lost in their own ideas and ruminations. We commonly say this person isn’t present. One might venture to say they aren’t truly participating in the conversation, though they apparently share the same space and time. In truth, this third person occupies a different place and time. The non-simultaneity of spacetime coincides with subjective differences, challenging conversation as a space of understanding. For understanding to occur in conversation, proximity and simultaneity must exist.
Therefore, presence concerns only things that are close, and the same applies in conversation. Conversation demands coincidence not just from a geographical-temporal perspective but also spiritually (we could also say “mentally”, “psychologically”,”emotionally”, or something similar. What we’re aiming at is “presence of mind”). This is to say that presence is only possible with conscious intention.
Presence = space + time + attention.
Blending these notions with concepts from physics, presence is, fundamentally, velocity. The closer we are in time and space, the more “present” we become. In this sense, presence is variable, inconstant, unlike the speed of light. Perhaps this is where disciplines diverge. There seem to be significant conceptual differences between presence as explained by physics and by psychology and other disciplines from the Humanities.
Regarding psychological presence, if light and time have constant velocities, can we find similar criteria for memories, desires, affections, emotions, ideas, and impulses? Perhaps not.
“The notion of ‘now’ is nothing more than a certain relation of a certain observer to the rest of the universe.”
— Kurt Gödel, 1949
For two observers to share a “now,” which, as we know, implies a “here,” both must be swift in presence; both must want to participate in each other’s “present.” We might consider “being present” as the willingness to participate in another’s experience and to consciously have the other’s participation in our experience; it is wanting to be felt and perceived while feeling and perceiving the other.
If presence operates like velocity in the physics of human connection, perhaps attention functions as gravity. Just as massive objects curve spacetime around them, significant topics and emotional states exert a gravitational pull on conversation, bending its trajectory and creating orbital patterns of recurring themes.
When we speak of a conversation having “gravity,” we intuitively recognize this parallel. Some conversations feel weightless—pleasant but inconsequential exchanges that leave no lasting impression. Others possess immense gravitational force, drawing us into their orbit, altering our course, making escape difficult once we’ve crossed their event horizon.
This metaphor extends further when we consider what might constitute the “dark matter” of conversation—the unseen forces that shape dialogue without direct observation. Cultural assumptions, power dynamics, unacknowledged emotions, and shared historical context exert massive influence on how conversations unfold, yet remain largely invisible during the exchange itself. Like astrophysicists inferring dark matter’s presence through its gravitational effects, we might only recognize these conversational forces through their manifestation in unexpected inflections, inexplicable tensions, or mysterious resonances.
H. Paul Grice’s concept of conversational implicature provides an illuminating parallel here. What Grice identified—that much of human communication relies not on what is explicitly stated but on what is implied—functions precisely as conversational dark matter. These implicatures operate according to principles (Grice’s maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner) that, like physical laws, govern interaction while remaining invisible to the participants. The statement “It’s getting late” might literally reference time but implicate “We should leave now”—a meaning transmitted through the dark matter of shared social understanding rather than explicit articulation.
Returning to intersubjectivity, understanding isn’t achieved merely through participants’ presence in a conversation. We must account for reasoning biases, cultural mannerisms, social pressures and conventions, and each person’s desires and limitations. Messages don’t always emerge clearly and, exacerbating matters, an interpretive gap always exists between any interlocutors. What is heard is never exactly what is said. With luck—or with luck and effort—one might come close.
This intersubjective gap bears striking resemblance to the quantum phenomenon of uncertainty. Just as we cannot simultaneously know a particle’s position and momentum with perfect precision (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle), we cannot perfectly transmit both the literal content of our thoughts and their emotional resonance. The more precisely we articulate complex ideas, the more their emotional texture may be lost. Conversely, the more we emphasize emotional connection, the less precisely we might convey intricate logical structures. This isn’t merely a limitation of language but a fundamental property of consciousness meeting consciousness.
In quantum physics, the observer effect describes how the act of measurement inevitably alters the system being observed. Similarly, in conversation, the very act of articulating a thought transforms it. We’ve all experienced beginning a sentence with one idea in mind, only to arrive somewhere unexpected by its conclusion. The process of externalization—of making internal thoughts external through language—creates a feedback loop that modifies both the thought and the thinker.
Conversational implicature further complicates this quantum-like uncertainty. When I speak, what I imply may seem obvious to me but completely escape you. The more I rely on implicature rather than explicit statement, the wider the intersubjective gap potentially becomes. Yet paradoxically, human connections often deepen precisely through this shared dance of implication and inference—when you understand what I mean without my having to say it directly, we experience a form of interpersonal quantum entanglement, a connection that transcends the limitations of explicit language.
Living in an era of time scarcity, in conversations we increasingly rely on intuition, as we probably always have and will continue to, which is less frequently investigated and adjusted by those who use it. Intuition without validation risks becoming presumption. For Kant, this was particularly problematic—he viewed uninvestigated intuition not as a valuable faculty but as a characteristic of the lazy or unintelligent, a way of avoiding the rigorous work of critical thinking.
On the subject of intuition, we can revisit Félix Ravaisson’s work, which gave us the idea—neither contradicting nor accepting, but advancing beyond Kant’s ideas—that intuition is, in itself, a form of intelligence rather than a sign of stupidity. However, because it is an “obscure intelligence that through habit ends up replacing reflection, (an) immediate intelligence where subject and object become confused, (...) where the real and the ideal, being and thought merge,” for it to emerge into clarity, it must pass through the sieve of critical reflection. Only in this way, I add, can we distinguish who we are from what we think.
Perhaps intuition represents a kind of quantum tunneling in human cognition—a phenomenon where particles pass through energy barriers that classical physics would deem impenetrable. Intuitive leaps allow us to arrive at understanding without traversing the intermediate logical steps, as if our consciousness briefly tunnels through the barriers of methodical reasoning. Like quantum phenomena, these intuitive processes appear to violate our normal understanding of causality, yet consistently produce results that later reasoning often validates.
Returning to physics, intuition could be equivalent to the desire to be faster than sound and light: to know the “now” of the other, of the world. To intuit is to want to be faster than the time a message takes to cross the space between two people; it’s the construction of a world that doesn’t yet exist because it cannot yet be perceived or felt; because it hasn’t yet happened. Can you see the risk of it being merely desire or, worse, manipulation?
Our contemporary communication landscape introduces new dimensions to conversational physics. Digital technologies create novel spacetime configurations that would have seemed impossible mere decades ago. We can now have “conversations” across vast distances with no temporal delay (video calls), or across significant time gaps with no spatial proximity (email, text). These technologies don’t merely facilitate conversation—they fundamentally alter its physics.
Consider how differently time operates in various conversational modalities:
Each modality creates its own temporal field with unique properties affecting presence, attention, and understanding. The physics of digital conversation often violates our evolved expectations about human interaction, creating both new possibilities and new limitations.
What happens to presence when it’s mediated through screens? The equation Presence = space + time + attention requires recalibration. Physical space becomes virtual; time becomes elastic; attention becomes divided. Yet somehow, genuine connection still occurs, suggesting that presence transcends its physical components.
Just as Einstein’s relativity revealed that spacetime isn’t an absolute framework but a malleable fabric, perhaps our digital age reveals that human connection isn’t dependent on absolute physical presence but can manifest through various configurations of attention and intention. The constancy isn’t in the medium but in the human capacity to reach across whatever void separates us.
This exploration reveals a profound paradox: our deepest connections with others require us to transcend the very constraints of physical reality. Just as physicists showed us that gravity bends space-time, meaningful conversation bends the subjective experience of presence, creating shared moments of understanding that defy simple explanation.
What if our most profound conversations actually create their own gravitational fields—temporal distortions where shared meaning briefly transcends the limitations of our separate existences? Perhaps the feeling of being truly understood, of genuine connection, is a momentary escape from time’s arrow, a small rebellion against entropy.
In this view, the art of conversation becomes not merely a social skill but a physics-defying act—a creation of temporary micro-universes where, for brief moments, we escape our fundamental isolation. The quality of our attention, our willingness to be fully present, becomes a force as real as gravity, bending the fabric of our shared experience.
If we accept this physics of human connection, ethical implications naturally follow. To withhold our presence—to physically occupy space in conversation while mentally absenting ourselves—becomes more than a social faux pas. It becomes a kind of existential refusal, a denial of the gravitational pull between consciousnesses. Conversely, to offer our full presence—to create that shared “now” despite all that separates us—becomes a profound ethical act, perhaps even the foundation of ethical relation itself.
Emmanuel Levinas suggested that ethics begins in the face-to-face encounter with the Other—that the very presence of another human face makes an infinite ethical demand upon us. Viewed through our conversational physics, we might say that true dialogue creates a gravitational responsibility, a moral force as fundamental as the physical forces that hold atoms and planets together.
And yet, unlike the constants of physics, this human relativity remains wonderfully unpredictable. No equation can fully capture the moment when minds meet in understanding, when the barriers between self and other momentarily dissolve. Perhaps this is precisely why conversation remains such a vital human art—because in it we experience something that transcends the mechanical universe, something irreducibly complex and inherently creative.
In a world increasingly mediated by technologies that promise connection while often delivering its simulation, cultivating this physics of presence becomes not just philosophically interesting but existentially essential. To be truly present with another person, to create that shared “now” despite all physical and psychological barriers, might be among the most profound acts available to us—a small miracle of human consciousness, a brief victory over time itself.
