Mapping the edge where physics and relation meet
Over the course of these conversations, we have traced the emergence of quantum theory through the perspectives of its architects: Planck, Born, Heisenberg, Bohr, Schrödinger, and Einstein. Each contributed decisively to the field of constrained possibility, and each illustrates in a different way the interplay between formal discovery, ontological ambition, and relational limitation.
Opening the Door: Planck
Planck introduced quantisation — a formal discontinuity. He opened the door to the strange without stepping through it. Discreteness existed in the calculation, not in reality. The threshold was crossed formally but not perspectivally. Here we see the first instance of discovery without ontological transformation. Possibility is constrained, but the cut remains unstaged.
Probability Without Perspective: Born
Born introduced probability as an objective property of systems. Chance replaced certainty, but perspective vanished. Probabilities floated free of construal, re-establishing realism at a higher level. This is the first major fault line: probabilistic realism. Relationally, the move mistakes measures of potential for actualisation for features of being.
Indeterminacy and the Collapse of Description: Heisenberg
Heisenberg revealed that the limits of description are structural, not merely instrumental. But he wavered, at times reifying those limits as ontological fuzz. The relational cut — indeterminacy as perspectival constraint rather than evolving property — remains unclaimed. Here, the distinction between system and instance, and the insistence that instantiation is not a temporal process, becomes critical.
Complementarity and the Phenomenon: Bohr
Bohr approaches the relational insight most closely. Phenomena, not objects; complementary descriptions; mutually exclusive but jointly necessary accounts. Yet he retains the lingering notion that descriptions somehow reflect something “behind” phenomena. Bohr shows us the fertile tension: relational cuts are visible, but not fully enacted.
The Wave That Would Not Decide: Schrödinger
Schrödinger formalised the space of possibilities with unparalleled precision. But the wavefunction was treated as a thing. Collapse was conceived as a mysterious physical process rather than a perspectival cut. The system/instance distinction is illuminated: formal completeness is insufficient without recognising instantiation as actualisation within construal.
Reality, Locality, and the Refusal of Construal: Einstein
Einstein reminds us of the cost of refusing relational cuts. Reality, separability, and locality are preserved, but at the expense of openness to possibility. Indeterminacy is rejected as ontic; the observer is externalised. His clarity makes visible what relational ontology must refuse: the insistence that reality exists independent of construal closes off potential.
Lessons for Relational Ontology
Taken together, these encounters map a field of constrained possibility:
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Discovery and formal success do not equal ontological transformation.
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Probability, indeterminacy, and complementarity mark the edges of what can be actualised.
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The relational cut — the move from potential to instantiation — is neither temporal nor object-bound.
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Representation and reality are not identical; treating them as such produces artefacts and paradoxes.
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The cost of refusing relationality is clarity, consistency, and ultimately, the foreclosure of new forms of possibility.
This series does not resolve quantum theory. It does not declare winners or losers. It does not reconcile the past with a present framework. Instead, it traces the evolving structure of possibility itself — showing what each thinker made possible, what they foreclosed, and where relational cuts might be enacted.
Concluding Thought
Quantum theory, when read through the lens of relational ontology, is not a story of objects and waves, of particles and probability. It is a landscape of potential instantiations, constrained by formalism, perspective, and conceptual commitment. Each figure we have encountered illuminates a different facet of this landscape — sometimes edging toward relational insight, sometimes resisting it entirely.
The field of constrained possibility is never closed. It is always open to new cuts, new actualisations, new ways of attending to phenomena. What this series offers, at last, is a map — not a destination — for those willing to trace the boundaries of the possible, and to follow relational cuts wherever they may lead.
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