Late at night, I often watch YouTube videos on topics at the margin of philosophy and science. I half-remembered a name from a discussion on the vexed question of the reality of quantum states. So, I sought the aid of AI, first Gemini and then, when the thinking got tougher, with Claude. I like Claude; he doesn’t overdo the flattery bit, and he'll tell me if I am wrong.
While searching YouTube, and with Claude’s help, a name surfaced: Jacob Barandes, a physicist and philosopher at Harvard, who has long argued that quantum mechanics has been telling us the wrong story about what's real. I thought I would share Barandes's argument, as it adds depth to some issues that arise in the trilogy: superposition, entanglement and decoherence.
The question Barandes keeps returning to arises from Schrödinger’s brilliant problem of the cat in the box. With this devilish thought experiment, we have the long-suffering moggy, a radioactive source, a trigger, and a phial of poison. Radioactive decay is a superposition phenomenon: the radioactive element will both emit a decay particle (killing the cat) and not emit a decay particle, and both states exist simultaneously. So, our cat, following the logic of where his equation points us, is in a quantum state of being both dead and alive simultaneously.
One early solution to the conundrum Schrödinger posed was that the cat's state is resolved only when an observer opens the box and looks. A ‘measurement’ event occurs and the quantum state ‘decoheres’ — the interference that made ‘dead-and-alive’ a meaningful description disappears, and the cat stops behaving like a fuzzy blend of both. But decoherence alone gives us only a probability, 50:50, not a fact. Something more is quietly assumed at that point: that the wave function ‘collapses’ and, lo and behold, we have either a live cat or a dead one.
Barandes doesn't buy it. Decoherence explains why we stop seeing a fuzzy dead/alive cat, he says, but it never explains how one outcome wins as opposed to the other — that further step is simply asserted, not derived. The measurement problem, on his account, is still exactly as open as it was in 1926. What does the quantum state represent, and what happens when quantum meets classical? What Barandes proposes runs against the instinct I'd landed on with Gemini's help, and I think against my own first take on the problem too. I'd assumed — and Gemini walked me into it — that the wave function is all there is: a bookkeeping device, an equation tracking probabilities, with nothing physically underneath it. What flows from cause to effect in the quantum world isn’t anything real but a state, described wholly by the mathematics, that carries the information from the quantum state of the radioactive particle to the emergence of a real physical state of the phial of poison and, hence, the cat.
Barandes argues close to the opposite. The equation, he says, isn't the real thing at all — it's a derived, approximate summary. What's real is a continuous, underlying physical process, always underway whether anyone is looking or not. It is a stochastic process: probabilistic and carrying a memory of its own past in a way a coin flipped into the air doesn’t. Nothing collapses when we look. Something that was always definite becomes newly available to us.
This is a harder position to hold than the one I started with, and I'm not yet sure I've settled into it. It costs more, in Ockham's terms, because it insists on something being there that we can never fully see, rather than simply declining to ask. But it offers something the ‘nothing exists but the equation’ view took away: an actual world, doing something, independent of the measurement system, whether me as an observer or some other classical state that ‘collapses’ the wave function.
When Gemini challenged me on whether I was comfortable with my original position, I responded with a Stoic’s shrug: it is what it is. No reality lies behind the veil; no reality lies behind perception. Acceptance is all that's left to do. But that, as Claude reminded me, isn't what the Stoics believed, and it isn't quite what I believe either. Their cosmos was not a curtain with nothing behind it. It was real, rational, and running by its own logic — the logos — and their equanimity came from accepting the limits of what was up to them within that real world, not from doubting whether the world was there. Epictetus never doubted the storm. He only refused to be angry at it for being a storm. If Barandes is right, that's the more honest fit. Something is always happening, whether I open the box or not—I simply don't get to see all of it, and asking to would be asking nature for something it never promised. That isn't resignation so much as a fairly old kind of respect for a world that owes me nothing in the way of transparency. I don't know yet whether this is where I land for good. But it's a better question to be sitting with than the one I started with — and better, I think, than the prejudice Gemini handed me on the first pass.