The Senior Common Room was unusually agitated.
Not outwardly, of course.
But several Fellows were stirring their tea with the absent, haunted rhythm associated with deep metaphysical injury.
At the centre table, Mr Blottisham had spread six books across the polished oak surface, all bristling with bookmarks and slips of paper.
“Absolute madness,” he announced triumphantly.
Professor Quillibrace glanced up from his tea.
“Quantum mechanics?”
“Yes.”
“I see.”
Blottisham jabbed at one of the books.
“Particles are waves. Waves are particles. Cats are dead and alive simultaneously. Observation changes reality. Objects communicate instantly across the universe. Frankly, the whole thing has collapsed into mystical gibberish.”
Miss Elowen Stray looked up from her notebook.
“Or perhaps one particular picture of reality has collapsed.”
Blottisham waved this away heroically.
“No no no. Physics has clearly wandered into philosophy by accident and become trapped there.”
“A common occupational hazard,” murmured Quillibrace.
Blottisham leaned forward.
“The problem is obvious. Quantum mechanics violates reality.”
Quillibrace blinked once.
“An ambitious achievement.”
“Well it does.”
“How unfortunate for reality.”
Blottisham frowned.
“You know what I mean.”
“I rarely do,” said Quillibrace. “But continue.”
Blottisham gathered momentum.
“Objects are supposed to possess definite properties whether or not we inspect them.”
“Supposed by whom?”
“By reality.”
“Ah.”
Blottisham pressed on.
“A particle cannot logically be in multiple states at once. Observation cannot magically create outcomes. And things certainly cannot influence one another instantaneously across vast distances.”
Elowen tilted her head slightly.
“You are describing violations of a metaphysical expectation, not necessarily violations of physics.”
Blottisham looked briefly wounded.
“There must be determinate reality underneath it all somewhere.”
“Somewhere?” asked Quillibrace.
“Yes.”
“Where precisely?”
Blottisham hesitated.
“Well… underneath.”
“A notoriously productive ontological category.”
Elowen smiled faintly.
“The interesting thing is that quantum mechanics itself functions extraordinarily well. The equations predict astonishingly precise results.”
“Exactly!” cried Blottisham. “Which makes it even more intolerable.”
Quillibrace sipped his tea.
“The crisis may therefore lie less in the mathematics than in what we expect the mathematics to describe.”
Blottisham pointed accusingly.
“That’s philosophy again.”
“Yes,” said Quillibrace. “It keeps surviving assassination attempts.”
A small silence followed.
Rain tapped softly against the windows.
At length Elowen spoke.
“Classical realism assumes that reality already exists as fully determinate objecthood prior to interaction.”
“Obviously,” said Blottisham.
“Is it obvious?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Blottisham opened his mouth.
Paused.
Closed it again.
Quillibrace rescued him gently.
“Mr Blottisham has inherited a very old metaphysical grammar.”
“A perfectly sensible one.”
“Undoubtedly. Unfortunately quantum mechanics appears to behave with insufficient respect toward it.”
Blottisham folded his arms.
“A particle must either be here or there.”
“Must it?”
“Yes.”
“Quantum mechanics seems oddly unconvinced.”
“That is the problem.”
“Perhaps,” said Elowen quietly, “the problem is not that reality lacks determinate states, but that we assume determination must already be complete before relational interaction.”
Blottisham stared at her.
“That sounds deeply suspicious.”
“It should,” said Quillibrace. “Most structurally significant thoughts do.”
Elowen continued carefully.
“In classical ontology, measurement is assumed to reveal pre-existing properties.”
“Yes.”
“But quantum mechanics repeatedly behaves as though determination becomes operationally stabilised only within particular relational conditions.”
Blottisham blinked.
“You mean observation creates reality?”
“No,” said both Elowen and Quillibrace simultaneously.
Blottisham looked pleased.
“Aha! Contradiction already.”
Quillibrace sighed faintly.
“Not consciousness creating reality, Mr Blottisham. Relation participating in actualisation.”
“Which sounds exactly like mystical nonsense.”
“Only because you are still imagining fully completed objects lurking behind appearances.”
“Where else would they lurk?”
“An excellent question,” said Quillibrace.
Elowen leaned forward slightly.
“Take the double-slit experiment.”
Blottisham groaned softly.
“The infernal slits.”
“The behaviour changes depending on the experimental arrangement.”
“Yes.”
“So perhaps the experiment is not merely revealing one stable underlying object from different angles.”
Blottisham narrowed his eyes.
“Go on.”
“Perhaps differing relational configurations actualise differing determinate outcomes.”
Blottisham stared.
“You’re suggesting the electron does not possess one completed identity prior to every interaction?”
“I am suggesting,” said Elowen, “that ‘completed identity prior to interaction’ may itself be the unstable assumption.”
Blottisham looked deeply alarmed.
Quillibrace intervened mildly.
“Classical physics works magnificently at macroscopic scales because certain stabilisations become extraordinarily durable.”
“Yes.”
“But quantum mechanics may expose the contingency of those stabilisations rather than the irrationality of reality itself.”
Blottisham rubbed his forehead.
“So the particle is not secretly a wave or secretly a particle?”
“Possibly neither category is fundamental in the way classical metaphysics assumes.”
Blottisham stared into the fire as though personally betrayed by ontology.
“And entanglement?” he demanded eventually. “Things communicating instantly across space?”
Quillibrace adjusted his spectacles.
“That only appears impossible if separable objecthood is treated as ontologically primitive.”
“But objects are separate.”
“Operationally, often.”
“Often?”
“Yes.”
“That is not reassuring.”
“No,” said Quillibrace. “Quantum mechanics has proved unusually inconsiderate in that respect.”
Elowen spoke softly.
“Perhaps entanglement is frightening because it reveals that relational coordination may precede the stable actualisation of separable objects.”
Blottisham looked genuinely pained now.
“You’re dissolving reality.”
“Not dissolving,” said Quillibrace. “Re-siting.”
“Into what?”
“Into relational actualisation rather than pre-completed substance.”
Blottisham leaned back heavily.
“So all the interpretations of quantum mechanics…”
“…may be attempts,” said Elowen, “to restore determinate reality somewhere.”
“In hidden variables,” said Quillibrace.
“Or branching universes,” said Elowen.
“Or observers.”
“Or information.”
“Or decoherence structures.”
Blottisham looked miserable.
“And none of them work?”
Quillibrace tilted his head.
“Oh, many work mathematically.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“No,” said Quillibrace. “It rarely is.”
The fire crackled softly.
Finally Elowen said:
“The real disturbance may be this:
quantum mechanics does not necessarily tell us that reality is irrational.
It may tell us that our expectation of fully determinate reality prior to relational actualisation was never as foundational as we imagined.”
Blottisham sat in silence for a long moment.
Then:
“I preferred Comte.”
“A simpler age,” said Quillibrace.
“At least objects had the decency to remain themselves.”
Quillibrace lifted his cup.
“The twentieth century was regrettably permissive about ontology.”
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