This series was not an intervention into quantum mechanics. It was an intervention into a confusion that regularly accompanies it.
Quantum mechanics works. Few scientific theories have ever worked so well. The persistent dissatisfaction voiced by physicists therefore cannot be located in predictive failure, experimental anomaly, or mathematical inadequacy. It arises elsewhere—at the point where questions about reality are allowed to masquerade as questions about physics.
The central claim of the series can be stated simply:
When physicists talk about “reality,” they are no longer doing physics, but they often fail to notice that they have changed activities.
Everything that followed was an attempt to make that unnoticed transition visible.
From Success to Disquiet
Quantum mechanics succeeds precisely because it is disciplined about what it does not say. It constrains prediction, calculation, and experimental expectation with extraordinary precision. But those same constraints frustrate a longstanding desire within physics: the desire for a picture of what the world is like in itself.
Rather than recognising this as a philosophical desire, it is often redescribed as a scientific one—an unfinished task of physics itself. The result is a peculiar situation in which physics is said to be incomplete, not because it fails in its own terms, but because it refuses to answer questions it never promised to answer.
Reality as an Unmarked Term
Throughout the series, “reality” functioned as an unmarked term: invoked constantly, specified rarely, examined almost never. It operated as a silent authority rather than an articulated concept.
This unmarked status allows ontological commitments to be smuggled in under the banner of methodological seriousness. Claims about what must exist, what cannot be real, or what really happens appear as sober extensions of theory, rather than as philosophical positions adopted without acknowledgment.
Making “reality” visible as a term—marked, contestable, and situated—was therefore a necessary first move.
Why This Was Not Anti‑Physics
Nothing here challenges the legitimacy, success, or necessity of quantum mechanics. On the contrary, the series insists on taking the theory seriously as a theory—which includes taking seriously its limits.
The critique was directed instead at a recurring rhetorical move:
treating ontological dissatisfaction as a scientific defect,
treating metaphysical preferences as empirical demands, and
treating philosophy as dispensable precisely when it is being tacitly performed.
To point this out is not to diminish physics, but to release it from an impossible burden.
Ontological Responsibility
The concluding claim of the series was not that physicists should stop talking about reality, but that they should do so responsibly—that is, knowingly, explicitly, and without pretending that ontology emerges automatically from formal success.
Quantum mechanics does not absolve us of metaphysical responsibility. If anything, it intensifies it.
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