1.2 Global vs Local Frames

“In the case of all things which have several parts and in which the totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts…” — Aristotle, Metaphysics

Horses are not very brave animals. Easily spooked and distracted, they wear special masks called blinkers—two small cups that narrow their vision forward, focusing their attention on the track ahead and away from the chaos around them. They are often worn by racehorses, to focus their sight on where they have to go instead of what is around it.

But a race seen through the horse’s eyes is never the whole story. A racehorse cannot tell whether it’s winning or losing from within its blinkers. The world around it—the other horses, the audience, the finish line—exists whether or not it is seen.

That’s why races employ observers, stationed at vantage points, focusing on the track as a whole, keeping score not only of the horses, but everything that comprises the racetrack, in order to see how each horse is positioned against it. Two views of the same system: the horse’s narrow, immediate one and the overseer’s broader one.

In physics, we call these perspectives frames of reference. The horse’s vision is a local frame—a small, self-contained patch of experience, defined by what the observer can measure directly. The vantage point is a global frame—a bird’s-eye description that connects many local frames into one continuous whole. Many pairs of eyes looking at the same portion of nature.