What Does Autonomous Physics Make Autonomous? Can the Outside of Human Physics Be Generated Without Fixing Observation, Variables, States, Time, Space, and Theory?

This paper asks what, exactly, becomes autonomous when physics is delegated to a scientific system capable of revising not only hypotheses and parameters but also the conditions under which physical inquiry is organized. Rather than treating autonomous physics as human physics executed by machines, the analysis asks whether observation relations, variables, state spaces, temporal and spatial partitions, inferential rules, and theoretical structures can themselves become objects of scientific generation and revision. The central question is whether a genuinely nonhuman physics can emerge without fixing in advance the categories through which physical reality is observed and modeled. Autonomous physics is therefore distinguished from automated physics: automation preserves an inherited problem space, whereas autonomy requires the capacity to generate new observables, variables, experimental couplings, and representational structures when existing ones become operationally insufficient. The paper further asks how such revisions can remain constrained by reality rather than collapsing into unconstrained formal self-modification. Xenoscience provides the framework for tracking configuration-dependent changes in observability, intervention, state construction, and theory formation while preserving non-closure with respect to reality as a whole. The broader claim is that the strongest form of autonomous physics would make the architecture of physical inquiry itself revisable, while remaining answerable to experimentally non-redundant differences.