This series stages conversations between relational ontology and the architects of quantum theory — Planck, Born, Heisenberg, Bohr, Schrödinger, and Einstein. Each conversation explores what became possible when their ideas emerged, what was foreclosed, and where relational cuts might be enacted. These are not histories, interpretations, or reconciliations. They are encounters designed to illuminate the structure of constrained possibility itself.
1. Max Planck — The Reluctant Revolutionary
Planck introduces quantisation as formal necessity, without allowing it to transform ontology. Discovery opens the door; the threshold remains uncrossed.
2. Max Born — Probability Without Perspective
Probability becomes a property of systems, not of perspective. The first major fault line appears: chance replaces certainty, yet relational cuts are ignored.
3. Werner Heisenberg — Indeterminacy and the Collapse of Description
Limits of description are revealed, but danger lurks in reifying those limits as ontological fuzz. Indeterminacy is perspectival, not temporal; instantiation is not a process.
4. Niels Bohr — Complementarity and the Phenomenon
Bohr approaches relational insight most closely: phenomena, complementary descriptions, mutually exclusive but necessary. Yet he retains the lingering notion that descriptions describe something “behind” the phenomenon.
5. Erwin Schrödinger — The Wave That Would Not Decide
The wavefunction is treated as a thing, collapse as a physical jump. Relational perspective restores the wave as a theory of possible instances, collapse as the perspectival cut.
6. Albert Einstein — Reality, Locality, and the Refusal of Construal
Einstein preserves classical realism, separability, and locality. His refusal makes explicit the cost of insisting on reality independent of construal: possibility is constrained, relational cuts foreclosed.
Concluding Reflections — The Field of Constrained Possibility
Taken together, these encounters map a landscape in which the actualisation of possibility depends on relational cuts, not formal completeness or representational realism. Discovery, probability, indeterminacy, and complementarity mark the edges of what can be instantiated. Insistence on observer-independent reality preserves clarity but closes the field of potential.
This series is not a resolution. It is a map of constraints, tensions, and openings — an invitation to follow relational cuts wherever they may lead.
No comments:
Post a Comment