The lingering intuition behind many explanations of the two-slit experiment is that interference patterns must somehow be produced by electrons acting together across time. If electrons arrive one by one, the thought goes, then the pattern must be gradually constructed out of their accumulated impacts. Something must be coordinating those impacts so that, taken together, they trace the familiar bands.
This picture is deeply intuitive—and deeply mistaken.
To see why, it helps to ask a deceptively simple question: what kind of thing is an interference pattern?
An interference pattern is not an event. It does not occur at a moment, nor does it have a location independent of the detections from which it is inferred. Nor is it a process unfolding in time. Nothing happens to a pattern as electrons are detected. What happens are detections; the pattern is a way of characterising their distribution.
This distinction matters. Events happen. Processes unfold. Patterns, by contrast, are recognised.
When we say that an interference pattern “emerges” as electrons strike the screen, we are not describing something coming into being in the world. We are describing a change in what is visible to us as observers with access to many instances. With only a handful of detections, the distribution is opaque; with many, it becomes legible. The world has not changed in kind. Our construal has.
The temptation to think of patterns as built is reinforced by everyday examples where accumulation genuinely produces a new object: a wall built brick by brick, a heap formed grain by grain. In such cases, each contribution alters the state of the system. The later state depends causally on the earlier ones. But electron detections do not stand in this relation to an interference pattern. No detection alters the conditions governing subsequent detections. Nothing about the experimental arrangement is modified by an electron striking the screen.
This is why talk of coordination is misplaced. Coordination presupposes interaction: signals exchanged, adjustments made, constraints updated. None of this occurs in the two-slit experiment. There is no mechanism by which electrons could coordinate even if we wanted to posit one, because there is nothing for them to coordinate with. Each detection is governed by the same constraints, regardless of what has happened before.
Once this is recognised, a further confusion comes into view. The idea that patterns are produced encourages us to treat the interference pattern as an effect for which electrons are jointly responsible. But electrons are not jointly responsible for anything here. Each detection stands alone. The pattern is not an outcome of their cooperation; it is a description of their collective distribution.
Put bluntly: electrons do not make patterns. Patterns make electrons intelligible.
This reversal is difficult to accept because it runs against a deeply ingrained explanatory habit. We are used to explaining global regularities by appealing to local interactions. When that strategy fails, as it does here, we are tempted to invent exotic interactions—non-local influence, retrocausation, hidden communication—to rescue the habit. The rhetoric of mystery thrives in this gap.
But the failure lies not in the phenomena, and not in the physics. It lies in the assumption that explanation must proceed from events to patterns, rather than from structured constraints to instances.
Once we let go of the idea that patterns are built or produced, the two-slit experiment loses much of its air of paradox. There is no longer any need to imagine electrons coordinating across time, consulting histories, or anticipating futures. There remains only a question that has so far been left implicit: what kind of thing is the structure that governs these distributions, if it is neither an event nor a process?
Answering that question requires a shift in how we think about systems and instances, potential and actualisation. In the next post, we will argue that the missing concept is instantiation itself—not as a process unfolding in time, but as the relation that makes individual events intelligible as instances of a structured potential.
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