Opening the door without crossing the threshold
Planck’s intervention is often treated as the beginning of quantum theory. That is not wrong — but it is incomplete in a way that matters.
What Planck introduced was not a new ontology, but a constraint on description. Faced with the failure of classical physics to account for black-body radiation, he introduced a quantisation condition that made the equations work. Energy could only be exchanged in discrete packets. The mathematics closed. The anomaly disappeared.
But nothing else was allowed to move.
Planck did not reconceive matter, radiation, or reality. He did not question continuity as an ontological commitment. Quantisation, for him, was a necessity of calculation — not a feature of the world.
And that hesitation is the point.
Quantisation Without Ontology
Planck’s position is often described as conservative. But “conservative” here does not mean timid or uncreative. It means disciplined by a particular image of what physics is allowed to do.
In Planck’s view:
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The world remains fundamentally continuous.
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Discontinuity belongs to the means of description, not to reality.
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Theory is a mirror refined by necessity, not a participant in constitution.
This is why Planck could introduce a constant that would later bear his name without allowing it to transform his ontology. The constant constrained calculation, not being.
From a relational perspective, this is a decisive moment of ontological arrest.
Discovery Is Not Transformation
Relational ontology insists on a distinction that Planck’s intervention makes newly visible:
Discovery does not equal ontological transformation.
A theory can require a discontinuity without acknowledging what that requirement reveals about the relation between system and instance, between potential and event.
This is not a failure of intelligence or courage. It is a consequence of treating theory as representation rather than as a theory of possible instances.
A Relational Cut
From a relational standpoint, quantisation does not announce that nature is “really discrete”. That would simply reverse the metaphysical polarity while leaving the representational frame intact.
Instead, quantisation marks a limit of construal.
What Planck encountered — without naming it — was the impossibility of treating instantiation as a smooth unfolding of underlying continuity. The formalism demanded a cut. But the cut was left uninterpreted.
What Changes When the Discontinuity Is Not in Nature, but in Construal?
This is the question Planck opens — and refuses to answer.
If the system is understood as a theory of possible instances, then quantisation is not a property of objects or energies. It is a constraint on what can be actualised as an event within a given theoretical frame.
Planck’s refusal to follow this line preserves the classical image of reality even as it destabilises it from within. The door is opened. The threshold remains uncrossed.
The Reluctant Revolutionary
That reply is not evasive. It is precise.
Planck’s legacy is not that he founded quantum ontology. It is that he revealed, perhaps for the first time, that formal necessity can outrun ontological commitment — and that physics can no longer rely on continuity as an unquestioned background assumption.
What he did not do is equally important. He did not allow the formal cut to become a perspectival one. He did not treat quantisation as a clue to the nature of instantiation itself.
That task would fall to others.
And they, too, would hesitate — though in different ways.
Next: Max Born — Probability Without Perspective
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