Heisenberg’s appeal to potentia—that “strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality”—was one of the most radical philosophical gestures of twentieth-century physics. In Physics and Philosophy (1958), he proposes that atoms and elementary particles do not belong to the same order of being as the objects of daily experience. Rather, they exist as tendencies—as “a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.”
In this, Heisenberg takes a decisive step away from representational realism. The world of the very small, he insists, cannot be thought of as a set of determinate entities. It is instead a structured field of potentialities that only yield definite form in relation to an experimental setup—a configuration of measurement, attention, and interpretation.
From a relational ontological perspective, however, this “middle ground” between possibility and actuality is not an intermediary state but a perspectival cut. The “potentiality” is not a ghostly substrate lurking between thought and reality—it is the system itself: a theory of possible instances. The event—the observed “fact”—is not what happens to that system, but what happens within the shift of perspective that construes one configuration as actual.
Where Heisenberg writes of the probability wave as a “tendency for something,” the relational view reframes this: what he describes as tendency is actually the structured potential of construal—the relational system from which phenomena are perspectivally actualised. What physics calls “collapse” is simply the movement from system (theory of possible instances) to instance (the construed phenomenon), without invoking any temporal sequence or hidden realm of half-being in between.
Heisenberg’s invocation of Aristotle’s potentia remains profound, but in relational terms, its metaphysics must be inverted. Possibility does not precede actuality—it is the structured space through which actuality becomes meaningful. Possibility is not a pre-existing condition of being; it is the relational intelligibility of being itself.
In this light, Heisenberg’s “world of potentialities” is not a deeper ontological stratum below the world of things and facts, but the same world seen through a different cut: the systemic perspective rather than the instantiated one. His “middle” is not a metaphysical layer between reality and appearance—it is the relational hinge through which each becomes intelligible as the other.
To speak in relational terms, there is no halfway house between idea and event—only the perspectival reconfiguration that renders one as the construal of the other. The potentia is not a mystical fog between worlds but the very grammar of possibility through which worlds can be construed at all.
From Heisenberg’s “world of potentialities,” we glimpse not a realm hidden beneath reality, but the very relational play through which reality becomes intelligible at all. And so, as the grammar of possibility turns toward story, we follow Liora into worlds where uncertainty smiles back — where every cat, whether certain or not, reminds us that the act of seeing is already the act of creation.
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