The figures who gave quantum theory its early form—Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Born, and others—were not merely solving technical problems. They were working at the limits of what could be said, pictured, and treated as real. Their disagreements were not secondary disputes over interpretation; they were fault lines in the very relation between theory, phenomenon, and reality.
This series stages a set of conversations between relational ontology and the architects of quantum theory—not to resolve those fault lines, and not to retrospectively conscript these thinkers into a contemporary framework, but to examine the conditions of possibility under which their concepts emerged, strained, and sometimes failed.
They are relational encounters.
Ontology as Conversation, Not Representation
Relational ontology begins from a refusal: the refusal to treat reality as something that exists independently of the construals through which it becomes available.
In this view:
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A system is not a thing, but a theory of possible instances.
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Instantiation is not a temporal process, but a perspectival cut—a shift from potential to event.
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A phenomenon is not an appearance of an underlying object, but first-order meaning as construed experience.
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There is no “unconstrued” reality waiting behind phenomena to be revealed.
Quantum theory, in its formative years, circled these insights repeatedly—sometimes approaching them with remarkable precision, sometimes recoiling at the last moment. The conversations staged in this series trace those approaches and retreats without smoothing them into coherence.
What matters here is not who was “right”, but what each position made possible, and what it foreclosed.
Why Conversation?
The dialogic form is not a literary indulgence. It is an ontological commitment.
A conversation foregrounds relation. It keeps disagreement alive. It prevents the retroactive stabilisation of meaning that so often accompanies historical commentary. Most importantly, it resists the illusion that concepts simply represent reality, rather than participating in its becoming.
Each post in this series stages a disciplined encounter between relational ontology and a particular thinker. The aim is not synthesis. It is friction.
Against Reconciliation
Much contemporary writing attempts to show that quantum theory “already implies” some preferred ontology—relational, informational, many-worlds, or otherwise. This series explicitly rejects that gesture.
Instead, quantum theory is treated here as a historical field of constrained possibility: a space in which certain ways of thinking could emerge, while others remained unthinkable or actively resisted.
When relational ontology speaks to Bohr or Einstein in these posts, it does not do so as a judge delivering verdicts, nor as a disciple offering gratitude. It speaks as a different cut through possibility—one that exposes where representational realism continued to exert its gravitational pull, even in the midst of radical innovation.
What This Series Is — and Is Not
This series is:
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an exploration of how meaning, reality, and description were reconfigured at the birth of quantum theory
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a disciplined use of fictional dialogue to surface genuine ontological commitments
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an inquiry into the becoming of possibility itself
This series is not:
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an introduction to quantum mechanics
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a defence of any mainstream interpretation
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a claim that physics licenses a particular metaphysics
Readers looking for explanations of wavefunctions, measurements, or experiments will find better sources elsewhere. Readers interested in how the very idea of explanation came under strain may find something of value here.
The Stakes
Quantum theory forced a confrontation with limits: limits of prediction, limits of description, limits of classical realism. But limits can be misunderstood. They can be reified, treated as features of reality rather than as features of relation.
Relational ontology offers a way of revisiting those limits—not to overcome them, but to understand what they are limits of.
These conversations take place at the edge of that understanding.
What follows is not a history of quantum theory, but a series of cuts through its becoming—each one opening a different space of possibility, each one leaving something unresolved.
As it must.
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