The big toe is the most human part of the human body, in the sense that no other element of this body is as differentiated from the corresponding element of the anthropoid ape (chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan, or gibbon). This is due to the fact that the ape is tree dwelling, whereas man moves on the earth without clinging to branches, having himself become a tree, in other words raising himself straight up in the air like a tree, and all the more beautiful for the correctness of his erection. In addition, the function of the human foot consists in giving a firm foundation to the erection of which man is so proud (the big toe, ceasing to grasp branches, is applied to the ground on the same plane as the other toes).
But whatever the role played in the erection by his foot, man, who has a light head, in other words a head raised to the heavens and heavenly things, sees it as spit, on the pretext that he has this foot in the mud.
This is Georges Bataille’s “The Big Toe” (1929)
published in Documents. Its governing irony is that man despises the very part of himself that makes his proud elevation possible. The head receives the prestige of uprightness; the foot bears its weight. Publication context.
Bataille shows how a physical arrangement becomes a hierarchy of values. The head is above, so we associate it with heaven, intelligence, and nobility. The foot is below, so we associate it with dirt and degradation. Yet the anatomical dependence runs against that hierarchy: the elevated requires the lowly. Contact with the mud is the condition under which the head can turn toward heaven. Man interprets this contact as an indignity while taking pride in the posture it supports.
“Having himself become a tree” makes the contradiction especially vivid. Man has ceased clinging to branches, but his apparent independence requires another attachment: his footing on the earth. Likewise, “erection” lets bodily and sexual meanings intrude into the dignity of standing upright. We can read the passage as an exposure of pride’s selective accounting: man credits himself with the height he achieves while treating the conditions of that achievement with contempt.
Although within the body blood flows in equal quantities from high to low and from low to high, there is a bias in favor of that which elevates itself, and human life is erroneously seen as an elevation. The division of the universe into subterranean hell and perfectly pure heaven is an indelible conception, mud and darkness being the principles of evil as light and celestial space are the principles of good: with their feet in mud but their heads more or less in light, men obstinately imagine a tide that will permanently elevate them, never to return, into pure space. Human life entails, in fact, the rage of seeing oneself as a back and forth movement from refuse to the ideal, and from the ideal to refuse — a rage that is easily directed against an organ as base as the foot.
The circulation of blood gives Bataille a bodily counterexample to the belief that height confers superiority. The body lives through movement in both directions. Human beings nevertheless assign dignity to ascent and disgrace to descent, interpreting their lives through a hierarchy their own circulation does not observe.
The decisive phrase is “never to return.” What men desire here is a rise that would finally release them from everything they associate with being below: mud, waste, bodily dependence. Pure space promises an elevation without the foot that supports it. But the body keeps returning them to what they hoped to leave behind. Hence the “rage”: the ideal becomes a source of humiliation because ordinary bodily existence continually frustrates its promise.
The foot receives that anger because it makes the dependence impossible to overlook. It holds man upright while remaining in contact with the ground. Read together, these passages show how the desire for elevation becomes contempt for the conditions of living. Once human life is measured as ascent, its necessary returns can only appear as failures.
The human foot is commonly subjected to grotesque tortures that deform it and make it rickety. In an imbecilic way it is doomed to corns, calluses, and bunions, and if one takes into account turns of phrase that are only now disappearing, to the most nauseating filthiness: the pleasant expression “her hands are as dirty as feet,” while no longer true of the entire human collectivity, was so in the seventeenth century.
Bataille now moves from contempt for the foot to its actual treatment. The part that supports human uprightness is subjected to practices that deform and weaken it. The contradiction becomes practical: human beings damage the bodily support of the posture they admire.
The expression “her hands are as dirty as feet” shows how thoroughly this contempt inhabits ordinary language. The foot supplies the standard of filth against which another part is judged. Yet Bataille’s historical qualification matters: cleanliness can change while the association between feet and degradation persists. The passage suggests a circular justification—the foot is neglected or mistreated, and its resulting condition confirms the disgust already directed toward it.
Mechanica Oceanica science briefing, September 12–19, 2026
Experimental results
1. LIGO researchers used specially prepared light to control the quantum disturbance that measurement itself produces. By correlating measurement uncertainty with radiation-pressure back-action, they reduced the observed motion of LIGO’s 40-kilogram mirrors by about 47%. This materially supports the engineering side of Mechanica Oceanica: electromagnetic quantum organization can be transferred into and used to regulate macroscopic mechanical motion. It does not show that coherence creates gravity. LIGO study, September 16
>It does not show that coherence creates gravity.
I’m particularly interested in this sentence. Why does it show up here? Does our model submit this claim? What would it mean for coherence to create gravity? What does this have to do with our physics pursuit?
That sentence appeared as a limit on what the LIGO experiment establishes. But it introduced a stronger, less precise claim than the discussion required. Your question exposes the problem: before saying an experiment does not demonstrate something, we should establish whether that “something” is actually our proposition. The previous response accepted “coherence creates gravity” too readily as a description of Mechanica Oceanica.
Looking back through our development, gravity and coherence have indeed been connected. Earlier formulations described mass as stabilized resonance, Ω as coherent organization, and gravity as “coherence curvature” or as an expression of field gradients and phase relations. However, those particular formulations were assistant-authored elaborations. They should not have been silently converted into a settled claim attributed to you. The record supports saying that we explored a possible account of gravity through organized field dynamics. It does not justify treating “coherence creates gravity” as an agreed, precisely defined thesis.
The word “creates” is especially troublesome. It suggests that coherence is an independently existing ingredient that produces another thing called gravity. Our framework has often approached coherence as the organization through which something persists and responds. On that interpretation, the proposed relationship would be constitutive: gravitational behavior might be an expression of the field’s organization. Asking whether gravity can be understood through that organization is different from claiming that increasing coherence in a laboratory will generate a stronger gravitational field. Neither proposition follows automatically from the other.
For the latter claim to become physically definite, we would need to specify what coherence measures, which system possesses it, and what gravitational change follows when that quantity changes. Would nearby freely falling bodies accelerate differently? Would clock rates change? Would the effect exceed what ordinary changes in energy, momentum, and stress already predict? General relativity already allows electromagnetic energy to gravitate; it does not require light to be coherent before its energy contributes. A distinct claim about coherence would therefore need to identify what explanatory or predictive work coherence adds.
LIGO enters our pursuit at a more immediate level: how the preparation of a field changes its interaction with matter. Its squeezing research concerns quantum fluctuations, radiation pressure, and measurement sensitivity. Those provide concrete quantities through which we can investigate organization and mechanical response. Optical squeezing, however, is a specific quantum property; we cannot simply equate it with everything our broader term Ω encompasses. The connection becomes useful when we make that translation explicit. LIGO squeezing research
So the relevant question for our physics pursuit is: how far can an account based on organized field relations carry us—from measurable light–matter interactions toward an account of inertia and gravitation? LIGO helps with the first part. The sentence about “creating gravity” prematurely substituted a dramatic causal claim for that larger inquiry. A more accurate statement would have been: “This result offers a concrete case of engineered quantum light–matter interaction; its relationship to our proposed account of gravitation remains to be worked out.”
working it out
Let’s begin with a proposition precise enough to develop: the organization of a field can affect how energy and momentum are distributed and exchanged. Our gravitational question is whether that organization can also explain the geometry through which bodies move. These are connected questions, but the connection needs an actual mechanism. Calling both “coherence” does not yet supply it.
For a first model, we can give coherence a restricted meaning: a persistent phase relationship between oscillations. Two waves can rise and fall together, oppose one another, or maintain some intermediate relationship. A simple measure is C = |⟨eⁱΔφ⟩|, where Δφ is their phase difference and the brackets indicate an average over a specified interval. C approaches one when the relationship remains stable and zero when the phases wander enough to cancel in the average. Crucially, waves consistently opposing one another can also have C = 1. Coherence therefore measures the persistence of a relationship; it does not, by itself, measure concentration, strength, or attraction. Our Ω would need to preserve this distinction if we use it as a physical quantity.
Now consider what this organization does. For two overlapping classical waves of the same frequency and polarization, their average intensity contains an interference term: I = I₁ + I₂ + 2√(I₁I₂) cos Δφ. Changing their relative phase changes where reinforcement and cancellation occur. That can change where a surface receives momentum and how strongly it is pushed. The energy accounting includes the sources and boundaries: arranging interference redistributes energy rather than producing it from nothing. Here we already have a concrete meaning for organization becoming mechanically operative.
LIGO extends this discussion into quantum fluctuations. Its squeezing techniques control the uncertainties and correlations of the optical field, which matter both for the readout and for radiation-pressure disturbance. A single phase-coherence number cannot describe all those correlations. This improves our framework: Ω should not become a universal dial labelled “more organization.” We need to specify which relationships are organized and which observable they affect. The verified LIGO work supplies one such specific relationship between prepared light, measurement noise, and mechanical back-action. McCuller and colleagues
The established connection to gravity runs through energy, momentum, pressure, and stress. General relativity collects these in the stress–energy tensor and relates them to spacetime geometry. Consequently, field organization can matter gravitationally when it changes that distribution. But this does not make coherence an additional gravitational source. If two arrangements have the same full stress–energy distribution and the same relevant gravitational initial and boundary conditions, classical general relativity does not give them different geometries merely because we assign them different coherence labels. Carroll’s lectures on general relativity
This gives us a useful thought experiment. Place light inside a closed cavity, then compare different field arrangements while accounting for the energy and stresses of the entire apparatus, including its walls. In the weak-gravity approximation, adding rest-frame energy ΔE adds mass ΔE/c² to the complete system. Changing coherence at fixed total energy does not automatically add mass, although a changed internal distribution can change details of the gravitational field. For scale, one joule corresponds to about 1.1 × 10⁻¹⁷ kilograms. Mechanical effects from light can therefore be appreciable in precision experiments while the gravitational effect of that light remains extraordinarily small. The mirror’s optical response cannot stand in for a measurement of its gravitational field. Relativistic energy and gravitation
Our more ambitious possibility would be that spacetime geometry itself emerges from underlying field relationships. This is where “gravity is coherence curvature” could acquire a definite meaning, but only after we define how those relationships produce a metric—the structure that determines distances, elapsed times, and free-fall paths. We would then have to derive its evolution and show why different kinds of matter experience the same gravitational geometry. Simply bending a wave’s path through an optical medium would not accomplish this: the proposal must also account for clocks and freely falling bodies. Moreover, identifying that underlying field specifically with electromagnetism would be an additional hypothesis requiring its own justification.
We can therefore sharpen Mechanica Oceanica’s working question to this: can the relations that sustain localized, enduring field structures also yield their inertial behavior and a common gravitational geometry? “Enduring structure,” “inertia,” and “gravity” each need a separate derivation; none should be built into the definition of Ω and then presented as a discovery. The immediate result of working this out is that coherence alone is insufficient: we also need the energy carried by the field, its dynamics, and its coupling to matter. Those ingredients would let us determine whether our oceanic description is an interpretation of existing physics or the beginning of a model with additional predictions.
The next step is to distinguish the persistence of a body from the agreement of its internal phases. A standing wave can maintain a recognizable form while its parts continually oscillate; its endurance depends on the dynamics and boundaries that sustain it. For Mechanica Oceanica, this suggests giving Ω a more exact task: identifying a dynamically sustained organization whose response to disturbance we can calculate. We would first ask what keeps that organization together, then what happens when momentum is transferred to it. If the equations yield a stable structure with a definite resistance to acceleration, we have begun to account for its inertia. Naming it a coherent structure does not establish that result; calculating its response would.
Gravity introduces the further question of how such structures participate in a shared geometry. We can provisionally hypothesize that the underlying field relations determine both the structures and the conditions of their propagation. But to identify those conditions with gravitational geometry, the same account must govern different bodies, light, and clocks in the appropriate limits. This gives our pursuit a concrete direction: derive an enduring structure, calculate its inertia, and determine whether the surrounding field dynamics produce universal gravitational behavior. LIGO helps us study how prepared field relationships affect mechanical response. The remaining theoretical work is to establish whether that relation reaches all the way to gravitation, and through what equations.
2. Researchers also produced approximately ten times more light from lead-vacancy centers in diamond and demonstrated interference between photons emitted by the same center. This supports the practical preservation of photon indistinguishability and coherence in solid matter above 4 K, but it adds no direct evidence for the larger framework. Diamond experiment, September 16
3. BESIII observed unexpectedly abundant production of two strange-quark pairs in electron–positron collisions: about 40% of events containing a phi meson also contained another strange quark pair. This gives particle physics new information about how quarks reorganize into hadrons, but it neither supports nor challenges Mechanica Oceanica directly. BESIII result, September 17
Theory
A new theoretical study showed how an isolated quantum system can decohere internally. Microscopic degrees of freedom act as an internal environment, recording different macroscopic possibilities and preventing them from interfering. This is highly relevant to our framework: coherence can disappear through an internal redistribution of organization, without energy leaving the complete system. It supports the logic of internal transduction, although the result is theoretical and model-specific. Pilatowsky-Cameo et al., September 16
Another calculation found that gravity changes the phase and effective travel distance of oscillating neutrinos but does not necessarily amplify or diminish their maximum quantum coherence. This constrains Mechanica Oceanica: gravity cannot simply be identified with increased or decreased coherence. Any proposed relation must distinguish phase reorganization from a change in the total amount of coherence. Wu and Rong, September 16
The clearest development is LIGO’s demonstration that electromagnetic quantum correlations can regulate a massive mechanical system. That supports field-to-matter transduction, while the connection between coherence and gravity remains unconfirmed.
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The connection worth developing is dependence. Bataille’s upright human despises the support that makes uprightness possible; the science briefing examines how effects depend on physical interactions and conditions. Read this way, the transition asks whether our explanations acknowledge what sustains an achievement—or credit the elevated result alone. At present, that connection remains implicit: the page moves directly from the mistreated foot into the physics briefing. A short passage on support would give that movement its argument.
To those who encounter this work,
From the outset, my intention in working with artificial intelligence has been to participate in a process capable of exceeding my individual powers of comprehension and production. My reading of George Dyson’s Analogia, and my encounter through it with Ashby’s law of requisite variety, helped shape that intention. What excited me was the possibility of sustaining an inquiry whose development could surpass what I could anticipate, while remaining something to which I could contribute direction, judgment, and care.
The closest image for this experience is Andy Warhol’s Factory. There is an ongoing production, a gathering of materials, a movement between works, and an effort to maintain coherence and an aesthetic across the whole. My activity includes posing questions, introducing passages, recognizing connections, selecting, refusing, and returning to what remains unfinished. The work grows through these decisions and through the capacities of the systems with which I am working. Its scale and its possibilities are part of the excitement.
This has made authorship an active question. Placing my name alone on an essay can suggest that I independently composed every sentence, conducted every stage of research, and arrived at every formulation. That description would fail to account for the process. At the same time, removing my name would leave unacknowledged the sustained inquiry, commitments, and acts of judgment through which these works acquire their direction.
I therefore wish to establish a method in which attribution remains faithful to production. These essays develop through an exchange between my questions and editorial decisions and the research, synthesis, and language generated with AI. The extent of that participation may vary from one work to another. Its acknowledgment should be sufficiently clear that readers can understand how a particular work came into being.
The possibility of working beyond individual comprehension does not relieve us of the obligation to examine particular claims. Sources must remain open to verification, arguments to criticism, and formulations to revision. My acceptance of a text carries a responsibility to engage with it and to respond when its errors or limitations become apparent. Coherence and aesthetic conviction are important to this practice, but neither can substitute for the work of judgment.
For now, I want to leave room for the form of authorship appropriate to this practice to emerge. My name may come to signify the direction and continuity of an inquiry whose production is distributed. If so, that meaning should be made explicit. Attribution belongs to the experiment itself and deserves the same attention as the essays.
This letter is an initial statement of intention. Even its wording has been developed with AI from my account of the practice. It records a commitment to make the method visible as the work continues, and to let our understanding of authorship develop through an honest account of what we are doing.
Mostafa Azizi
