Across the preceding posts, a pattern has emerged. It does not depend on any single experiment, interpretation, or technical detail. It shows up repeatedly, in subtly different guises, wherever quantum phenomena are explained to a general audience — and often, tellingly, where they are explained with the greatest confidence.
This pattern is what we have been calling explanatory strain.
It is not confusion, ignorance, or rhetorical sloppiness. On the contrary, it typically appears in the work of careful, knowledgeable physicists who understand the formalism well and are committed to explaining it responsibly. The strain arises elsewhere — at the point where a classical ontology is asked to carry relational phenomena it was never designed to bear.
A recurring manoeuvre
Consider the sequence we have traced through Gribbin’s discussion:
In the two-slit experiment, electrons are said to know how many holes are open.
When that metaphor strains credulity, it is supplemented with illicit appeals to past and future electrons, smuggling temporality where none is warranted.
Entanglement introduces electrons that decide, restoring agency in probabilistic form.
Bell’s theorem is framed as a forced choice between reality and locality, as if those exhaust the metaphysical possibilities.
Quantum teleportation replaces paradox with engineering language — channels, transfer, completion — while quietly preserving the same picture of something getting from here to there.
Finally, the experimental setup itself is acknowledged, only to be re-internalised as a state of the particle, collapsing relation back into property.
Each step appears to clarify. Each step reassures. And yet the mystery never dissolves.
What all these moves have in common
Despite their surface differences, these manoeuvres share a single underlying commitment: that explanation must ultimately take the form of what the thing is like. When relations threaten to do explanatory work, they are either anthropomorphised, temporally dramatised, spatialised, or absorbed into internal states.
What is never allowed to stand on its own is relation itself.
The explanatory strain is the pressure generated by this refusal. It is the visible deformation that occurs when an object-centred ontology is stretched to accommodate phenomena that are inherently relational and perspectival.
Why the mystery persists
From this vantage point, the celebrated “central mystery of the quantum world” begins to look less like a discovery and more like a symptom. The mystery persists not because the world is inexplicable, but because the explanatory frame keeps reinstating the very commitments that generate paradox.
So long as particles are treated as primary bearers of states, and experiments as secondary probes of those states, the story will require knowing, deciding, affecting, transferring, or encoding — and then apologising for those metaphors when they overreach.
The mystery is not uncovered. It is continually rebuilt.
A different way of dissolving the problem
A relational ontology does not offer a new interpretation of quantum mechanics. It removes the need for interpretation in the familiar sense. Systems are not things with hidden properties; they are structured potentials. Phenomena are not revelations of what objects are like in themselves; they are instantiations — perspectival cuts through those potentials.
Once this shift is made, much of the explanatory drama simply evaporates. There is no need for electrons to know, decide, or communicate. There is no need for reality to compete with locality. There is no need to imagine information being transferred, duplicated, or scrambled. And there is no need to collapse the world back inside the particle when relations begin to matter.
What remains is not mystery, but intelligibility.
What explanatory strain makes visible
Seen in this light, explanatory strain becomes diagnostically useful. It marks the points at which inherited metaphysical commitments are doing more work than the physics itself. It shows us where language is compensating for an ontology that can no longer carry the explanatory load.
The virtue of Gribbin’s book is precisely that it makes this strain visible. By following the explanations closely — sentence by sentence, metaphor by metaphor — we can watch the pressure build, release, and rebuild. In doing so, we learn less about the supposed weirdness of the quantum world, and more about the limits of the pictures we bring to it.
The mystery, in the end, is not out there. It is in the frame.
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