If relativity made light the structuring medium of space and time, quantum theory fractured its certainty. At the quantum scale, light was no longer a continuous wave but also a particle — the photon — embodying a radical duality that resisted classical construal. Wave and particle were not simply alternative descriptions; they revealed that possibility itself could not be stabilised within a single order of being.
Superposition intensified this destabilisation. A photon could exist in multiple potential states at once, actualising only in relation to a measurement. Light was no longer just the constant of relativity but a locus of indeterminacy: probability rather than determinism governed its behaviour. Here, construal is no longer about mapping what is already there, but about the conditions under which the possible becomes actual.
In this frame, light becomes an ontological metaphor for potentiality itself:
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Indeterminate yet constrained: superposition embodies the openness of possibility within a structured field.
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Relational actualisation: the collapse of the wave function is not inherent to the photon but emerges through relation — the act of observation, the context of interaction.
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Probabilistic horizon: possibility is not erased by actualisation but statistically weighted, shaping the field of what may yet occur.
Quantum light thus marks a new inflection in the genealogy of possibility. It no longer guarantees order (as in theology), perspective (as in optics), or invariance (as in relativity). Instead, it foregrounds indeterminacy as a constitutive feature of the cosmos. The symbolic order of light shifts again: from medium of divine illumination to probabilistic matrix of the possible.
Light here is neither wholly predictable nor wholly chaotic. It is the shimmering edge where potential and actuality are co-constituted through relation — a luminous emblem of the probabilistic ontology that modern physics makes visible.
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