Layers of Reality

June 20, 2026 1 min read

Here is a sketch of reality arranged along the energy ladder, as understood by modern physics (please appreciate my artistic prowess 🙃). I use it in my lecture notes to locate the covered topics on the energy ladder — from the cosmological scales, down through classical, atomic, nuclear, and high-energy physics, to the Planck scale.

Notably, there are three regions where “magic happens” (meaning: we have no clue):

On the very large length scales in cosmology (the origin and fate of the universe)
At the transition from quantum to classical physics (the Measurement problem)
On the smallest length scales (the problem of quantum gravity)

Layers of Reality — The layers of reality, arranged along the energy ladder.