Drawing the Mark in Physics, Story, and Magick

Adam Blvck, 2026-10-19

Last time I met the Laws of Form community, in Liverpool, I came home with a board game: Tarati, which I then rebuilt for the web. This year, at LoF26 in Wolfson College, Cambridge, I brought physics.

Nineteen minutes, a full room, and slides that flew by faster than anyone could read them. So here is the talk, a summary of what I set out to say, and a transcript you can read at your own pace. Click any timestamp and the video jumps to that moment.

id: IH6h0ndEvyU
title: Drawing the Mark in Physics, Story, and Magick (LoF26, Wolfson College, Cambridge)
poster: /media/talks/lof26-drawing-the-mark-1280.jpg

In short

The talk takes one idea through six places: to do physics is to draw a form against a background and wait for it to change.

1. Physics as a distinction. A question becomes a theory, the theory becomes an apparatus, the apparatus produces data. Once the measurement is made, the machine drops out of the story. We speak about the mass of the Higgs boson, and nobody mentions the LHC anymore. Measurement, read through Laws of Form, is an action that changes the value of forms.
2. The measurability of a form. Add one mark, at random, anywhere in a form. How likely is its value to change after simplification? That probability is the form's measurability. A single mark comes out at one half. Simulating up to 80,000 forms shows a clean asymmetry with a scale-invariant power law: forms that evaluate to the empty state become more measurable the more you perturb them, and forms that evaluate to the marked state become less measurable.
3. Good theories become a medium. A theory that can absorb endless additions and stay the same has almost no measurability. My example was string theory. Quantum mechanics and solid-state physics are so measurable that they became the medium we now live in: computers, YouTube, this page. They are the unmarked state.
4. Bell's inequality in the algebra of distinction. I wrote the CHSH game entirely in forms. Classically, its equals sign is an XNOR, and the best possible policy wins 75% of the time. Let imaginary marks perturb the equation and new kinds of equality appear. One of them reaches about 85%, close to the quantum value, with no Hilbert space, no postulates of quantum mechanics and no continuum.
5. Time and spacetime. Compare Bell tests across time instead of across space, give the future a quarter turn, and the same 85% shows up again: a temporal Bell inequality. Marking spacetime itself seems to need complex or even quaternionic forms, with Wick rotations and the three axes Peter Rowlands uses in nilpotent physics (time and energy, creation and destruction, the scales of mass).
6. Story. If each of us moves forward through time as a forward form, the same calculus may describe how we live our stories: story velocity, serendipity, perhaps a conserved quantity and five classes of story. And if there is an imaginary wall between you and me, then I have just turned you a quarter turn.

I closed on one line: a formalism has succeeded when it stops being cited and becomes a medium, the unmarked state.

The questions afterwards went deep fast: how the perturbation graphs were generated, whether imaginary marks could act as a Bell resource for algorithms, Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway, decoherence, the chirality of the imaginary mark, and von Neumann's own doubts about Hilbert space.

Transcript

Lightly edited for reading: filler words removed, names and terms corrected. Questions from the floor are paraphrased. My answers stay close to what I said.

Physics, story and magick

00:00 Hi everyone. My name is Adam Blvck, or Blazejczak, however you want to twist your tongue. I will be speaking about drawing the mark in physics, stories, and magick with a k.

Physics, for me, is making sense of the universe, and the primary method of doing that is measuring the universe. Storytelling, for me, is about making sense of who we are, how we can transform, and how stories move us. Magick with a k is my physicist's interpretation: the art and practice of using our imagination (there's this magic word in it) to configure the physical space we live in.

00:47 A little about where this comes from. I am a physicist, currently doing a master's degree at Ghent University. I just finished my bachelor's in theoretical physics. I'm a computer scientist too, and I'm an app developer working in experiential design, where the idea is that people enter the user interface to relive and transform.

So let's start in our current age. Everybody is aware of what's happening: it seems as if left-brain activity is being outsourced to automation. And so I would dare to say that the only thing that matters now is this: what do you want to do with your attention? Where will you be going?

01:26 Because let's be clear, this talk is a distinction. I am trying to capture your attention, and as we go into this distinction we will be travelling forwards in time, into this mark. A mark (that's the thesis here) is the forward movement of our attention. It's where our attention is being projected, and along the way we will be ignoring the galaxies, the people, everything around it.

The cycle of physics

02:06 So let's try to enter this mark. We are here at the centre. In physics, we set up theories. These are the equations of quantum field theory. Call that quantum field theory, and that is this mark. On the other side we ask: is this true? So we draw another mark, call it the LHC at CERN, and we build huge machines to verify whatever we have theorised.

02:40 How does this look in practice? I want to take you on a journey through the idea of measurement in Laws of Form. I will define a new term, the measurability of a form, and I will touch on Bell's inequality, time permitting, though probably not too deeply. Then I will pivot into story structure and the meaning of the imaginary mark, which will probably spill into the Q&A.

03:12 In physics there is a law of everything, a kind of theory of everything, and that is the conservation of energy. There are all the conservation laws, of course, but when you have a system, the energy after minus the energy before should be zero, and you can represent that in Laws of Form. We also have the notion of the vacuum in our quantum theories, and here there is the nilpotent physics of Peter Rowlands. He reformulates quantum field theory so that it cancels itself when the wave function acts on itself, and that is very close to our second axiom of Laws of Form.

03:42 Okay, this is fun. I now want to move into measurement, and to do that we're going to measure an apple. I am looking for an apple. There is an apple. Wrong. I am here with my attention (or at least trying to hold yours). We move around a room, suddenly our distinction captures the apple, and we enter the empty state. Remember, I defined the mark as looking for an apple, and by the end of it I ended up back in this empty space, where everything has happened. I can now do anything. I found my apple, I identified with it, and I dissolved into the vacuum.

04:48 So how does this look in physics? Physicists once asked: what is the mass of the Higgs boson? And they said, let's build a theory. We start from symmetry. These are the equations you have to go through to get all the way here, to the equations of the apparatus, which is classical in nature. With that they had everything, from what the question supposes to what the apparatus should look like. Let's build a machine.

05:20 The machine is a measurement device, and it produces data. And then we say: yes, that's it, that is the distinction we were looking for. That's where the mass of the Higgs boson lives, where a Higgs boson decays into two particles of light.

So what I'm proposing is that this is a cycle. Physics is not the question. Physics is not the theory. Physics is not only the measurement device, nor the data and the stories we tell about them. It's the field, a twisting field. It goes around like a circular story structure, if you wish.

05:54 You'll notice I'm already using imaginary marks in a suggestive way over here. If I asked you what a theory is, what physics is, you might say: well, it's that book. I'm not quite sure what it does, but it's there. Questions and measurements are a big, important part too, and they twist us into these measurements and these theories.

06:25 So when I just described the mass of the Higgs boson, we didn't learn anything about a Higgs boson. We produced forms that, once we proposed them and set them up, somehow disappear after a while, because they are so finely tuned that the background itself is being measured. When a distinction enters, we make a distinction.

What is a measurement?

07:09 So what is measurement in this sense? A measurement is an action that changes the value of forms. Machines, for example, or our consciousness, or you looking at me. I'm trying to change you a little bit here. In quantum physics, measurement is something else. It requires many postulates and a vast theory, a good thousand pages of study, and then you won't get it anyway. It's about state preparation.

07:40 Laws of Form has this beautiful quality of simplifying such things. So let's go back and analyse what happened. I was looking for an apple. An action happens: I move through the room, an apple appears in my distinction, and I come back to the empty state. We built a machine, a particle went through the detector, and in both cases we have a discovery and the machine more or less disappears. We can all speak about the mass of the Higgs boson now, because the machine doesn't matter anymore. It has been measured.

The measurability of a form

08:15 So I'm asking: is there something like an elementary particle theory of form, a way to describe elementary particles in forms? I'm not sure. But the first step is to define measurement, and so my first step is to define measurability. This is where Laws of Form really kicks in.

08:46 What is the probability that a form Z, any expression of any kind, will change value when you add a single mark to it at random? Let's perturb it with a single mark. The dashed lines are where you can add one, and each choice gives a new form with a new value. If the value changes, it counts, and measured against the sum of all possibilities, that is the measurability of the form.

09:18 Summing over the distinguishable states, the measurability of a single mark under a single perturbation is one half, a bit like the spin of an electron being one half. A nice little coincidence. We can repeat this for other forms, and we can go deeper by adding a k and speaking about the order of measurability: will the form have changed value, after simplification, once I add ten random marks?

09:51 Here is an example, and I want to put your attention on this. On the left is a form that, after simplification, is the empty state. On the right is a form that simplifies to the marked state. The measurability of the left form is 60%. The measurability of the right one is zero.

10:24 Something very interesting is happening here that was invisible until now. Forms that evaluate to the empty state, of all shapes and sizes, resolve more and more to the marked state the more you perturb them. Whereas forms whose value is the marked state become less and less measurable the more we perturb them, the more we add our own marks to them. And measurability means the expression changes value after simplification.

11:00 This is very particular, because after many, many simulations there is a power law at play. It's scale invariant: it doesn't matter how big your form gets. I tried this with up to 80,000 forms evaluating to either the empty or the marked state, and again there is this asymmetry. The marked state is uniquely different from the unmarked state.

11:34 This alone warrants another fifteen minutes. There is more data on the invariance, there are power laws at play, and I found a few phase transitions along the way, but we won't get into that.

Good theories become a medium

12:02 Because what I want to suggest is that a bad theory in physics is a gigantic form with the lowest possible measurability. Like string theory. It's a huge theory, sixty thousand pages of study, many years of hardcore, single-minded concentration, and it won't change. How do you even contribute? You keep adding to it and it keeps being string theory. The perfect theories are of the medium kind, like quantum mechanics and solid-state physics. Such a good theory. It's so measurable that we can now express ourselves on YouTube using computers. It becomes a medium, because it's the empty state.

12:47 It's like this room. This room is a medium: no matter how many distinctions you add, the more you add, the more you define that this room is actually here. You are measuring the room. So there are very interesting notions here.

Bell's inequality in forms

13:03 Then I applied this to quantum mechanics (and now I'm pushing for time) through Bell's theorem. Here's the idea. I have two envelopes, distributed so that one holds an up arrow and the other a down arrow. They go to Alice and Bob, and when Alice opens hers, she knows what Bob has.

13:36 But in quantum mechanics there is this three-dimensional, almost quaternionic envelope, where only if Alice and Bob choose to measure along the same axis do they get matching results. Otherwise neither knows what the other has. And there's an experiment that tests this: the CHSH inequality. You have George. He sends two random values, X and Y, to Alice and Bob. They each make a calculation and return the values A and B.

14:08 George asks: is X AND Y equal to A XOR B? It takes a good few years of contemplation to get this. Intuitively he's asking how well Alice and Bob can avoid doing the same thing across a huge distance, how well they can know they're not guessing the same value. Classically, when you solve this, you get a 75% win rate.

14:44 That's the classical limit: how well you can measure yourself and guess the other's value across a huge distance when you only have classical properties. When you share a quantum object, the win rate goes up by about ten percentage points, because there is quantum correlation hidden in what was distributed, and you can guess the opposite that much better.

15:13 So we can apply the algebra of Laws of Form to this. On the left we get this form; on the right, the XOR form. We just write it down. But then what is this equals sign? Classically it's the XNOR, and that's fine, but it gives nothing impressive: a 50% win rate with random values and at most 75% with an optimal policy.

15:52 Now, in quantum mechanics you are allowed to use imaginary values. What happens if we use imaginary values to perturb this equation? Not only do we get new equations for what equality means and how we compare values, but after doing your best you can actually push past the classical boundary and reach quantum-like results. These are the names of the forms I used for equality. I can't go into them deeply for lack of time, but I find it fascinating that I reached an 85% win rate without defining a Hilbert space, without the five postulates of quantum mechanics, and without any calculus of continuity. That is very interesting, and a hint towards something.

Across time, into story

16:42 Because when I bring in the idea of measurement I just introduced: usual Bell tests are measured separately across time. You gather the results and then you have your statistics. If you compare them across time (I have a value here from one Bell test and compare it with this value: is it different?) the measurability isn't so big. But if you twist it, if you transform the past or the future and compare those values, you get very similar results again.

17:17 Again an 85% rate, when you transform going into the future: you turn yourself one quarter to the right and compare that value, and then compare yourself again. I'm not saying we live in a twisting universe. I'm saying that we are moving forward through time, that each of us has a forward form, and that we are apparently engaging with these imaginary forms.

17:47 We can try this in spacetime and see that it won't work for about half of the theorems, but perhaps we can add Wick rotations, local rotations in spacetime, to make it work. Here we have the time axis, and that is a fact of life. We can subdivide time and energy. We have creation and destruction, receiving and giving. And we have scales of mass in physics. These are the facts of life, in a few ways, and these are the three dimensions also defined in nilpotent physics. So now we have a real calculus to speak about the interaction of imaginary forms.

18:19 So if I ask you how you will be living your story, could we map that onto the imaginary forms? Say that you are entering these phases, then derive story velocity and story serendipity, and perhaps a conserved quantity of stories, giving five classes of stories. Who knows, maybe we could help ourselves better when engaging with other people's stories.

18:58 Because I'm here and you're there. But what if there is an imaginary wall between us? Then I just turned you a quarter turn.

And so: a formalism has succeeded when it stops being cited and becomes a medium, the unmarked state. Thank you.

Questions from the floor

19:21 The chair thanked me (and noted the slides went by far too fast to read), then pointed to Jeff Miller, a theorist Spencer-Brown knew and mentions in the preface of Laws of Form, who worked around 1980 on what happens when you add a mark to arbitrary expressions. His wife embroidered the tree lines of those structures. Where that embroidery ended up, nobody knows.

20:37 Andrew asked whether the perturbation graphs came from a Monte Carlo method or from walking every possible form down the tree.

I used a stochastic process. I took the two axioms and defined a temperature: a probability of how often you apply one of them, going from one mark to two by the law of calling, or the other way, the law of crossing. So I built a whole tree of a stochastic process, where a single form, a marked or an unmarked state for example, grew into these gigantic possibilities, and I ran them through it.

21:42 Laurie wanted to talk further about using imaginary marks to approach the Bell limits in Laws of Form notation, and asked whether I'd considered the algorithmic side: if this kind of non-local coordination (quantum pseudo-telepathy) can be imagined in Laws of Form, some problems could be reframed as games and solved more efficiently, whether or not that needs a quantum resource.

Absolutely, I agree. What I discussed here, comparing two Bell tests and their outcomes across time, is the temporal version of Bell's inequality, and quite a few recent papers discuss how temporal Bell inequalities show up in psychological experiments, like guessing cards. I haven't knitted that together yet, but it's on the menu for sure.

22:58 Brian recommended Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway, which starts from the measurement apparatus that makes something definite and widens it to apparatus in general, producing phenomena in which many observations work together.

I think it fits. We live in a world with many forces of influence that act on us without our making a distinction of them, and still they influence us. So it speaks to that, and I wonder how we can build this formalism around it.

24:02 Fred added that Barad doesn't stop at the apparatus: she includes the life-world of the physicists and all their activity in the device.

24:24 A participant connected the talk to the morning's sessions: measurement turning up everywhere in physics hints at a deeper interpretation, where the way stories develop and things transform is what underlies behaviour, at the quantum level and in our own experience.

Yes. A new duality is about to emerge, like a new postulate.

25:21 Alan asked whether the stochastic method relates to decoherence.

I'm currently experimenting with an equivalence between what we describe as marks and Hilbert spaces, and only then would decoherence make sense. Unless, for example, we invert equations. Say z equals some huge form with a variable a inside it. What is a, then? How do you invert that? From my research, which is not complete at all, once certain conditions are met, a form that was completely deterministic in one direction gains probability when you look at it the inverted way. That's where decoherence could come in: you did something, you want to see what it did, and you enter into probabilities of what the initial state was. So decoherence is almost the preparation of a state that starts to decohere because you lose the state. That's the closest I've come, and without defining a Hilbert space it's really hard, especially because the formalism is so measurable.

26:51 Lisa asked whether I had anything to say about particular genres of science fiction and fables.

I wouldn't dare. All I can say is that scientific progress is almost like a quest structure. I really agree with Leon on that. You engage with a problem and try to solve it, over and over, starting from defining yourself as a problem solver, and at the end you have the problem solved. Funny enough, science fiction troubled my mind because it got too heady, so I haven't read any for the last seven years.

27:56 Rachel said physics is so much about distinctions and observers, which is about story. She asked whether the twist that compares past and future relates to the modal mu-calculus, and whether I could say more about the twist being inherently chiral with the imaginary value.

I don't know the mu-calculus. But the chirality, absolutely. When I'm here and you're there with a twist, you can do this experiment. Take this value here and push it through the wall: it gains, let's call it, not. Push not through the wall again and it becomes not-not, so it's here again. Do the same with an imaginary wall, an imaginary distinction, and here becomes here with, say, a left twist, while from the other side the wall now looks right. So there is a chirality inherent in the imaginary mark. That's also why, in quantum mechanics, imaginary values cannot be ordered and let the wave function emerge: the interference effect is there because imaginary values are chiral, yet there is no absolute left or right.

30:12 A participant recalled that two years after von Neumann published his book on quantum mechanics in 1932, he wrote to Birkhoff that he no longer really believed in the Hilbert space formalism and wanted to move to lattices of closed linear subspaces.

I agree. There's a notion in physics called the Church of the Larger Hilbert Space: the idea that you can always define a bigger Hilbert space where everything you want to describe lives. But the Hilbert space completely excludes the human, and I cannot imagine how a theory of everything can exclude subjectivity.