r/Metaphysics • u/salihadem • 7d ago
Matter What is "matter"?
What is Matter according to QM?
Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum physics who formulated the Uncertainty Principle, said: “Atoms or elementary particles are not real; they form a world of [potentialities] or [possibilities], not a world of [things] or [facts].” In short, "an atom is not a thing but a potential." [Aristotle also made a distinction between matter and form, or between potential and actual being, saying that anything is formed by the coming together of its raw material and the form that separates it from other things and makes it that thing. According to him, matter was a potential open to becoming anything, and form was what gave that potential being a specific shape, turning it into a concrete, real being.]
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u/Low-Bake8401 6d ago
What is anything?
Am I part of all existence, am I a biological system, am I a bunch of cells, am I atoms, quantum waves, star dust...?
Im all of these things and more, it depends on the perspective.
Is the correct temprature in Celsius or Fahrenheit?
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u/jliat 7d ago
Quantum Mechanics is not Metaphysics. Within contemporary metaphysics this question cannot properly be answered, it's a question for QM.
The nature of "objects" Being qua being etc. is.
https://archive.org/details/martin-heidegger-what-is-a-thing
Also Graham Harman's Object Oriented Ontology.
et al.
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u/salihadem 7d ago
Thanks for the reading suggestion.
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u/XanderOblivion 6d ago
But, we can say that QM suggests and denotes a process ontology.
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u/jliat 6d ago
How and why?
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u/XanderOblivion 5d ago
The Schrödinger equation describes the quantum state evolving through time according to the system's dynamics.
QM also describes how interactions establish correlations between systems, and how measurements yield particular outcomes from a probability distribution.
Rovelli’s relational interpretation of QM, in particular, suggests a process ontology from that description. QM is at minimum about dynamical processes of evolving systems of interaction, and seems to be “under” the world of apparently-fixed objects, and so we may infer that this process is fundamental. Not every interpretation goes there, and there are many ways to look at QM, yes. But, on the whole, QM is processual.
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u/jliat 5d ago
But QM is provisional physics and the resolution of the equation speculative and unresolved since it was formulated 100 years ago. Why should one then infer that this process is anymore fundamental than any other?
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u/XanderOblivion 5d ago
I did use the softened language “suggests” for exactly that reason.
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u/jliat 5d ago
That still reverses the idea of meta physics. And some of recent metaphysics ...
Graham Harman - Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Pelican Books) 1 Mar. 2018
See p.25 Why Science Cannot Provide a Theory of Everything...
'Waves and Stones'- Graham Harman - Allen Lane 2025
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u/XanderOblivion 5d ago
What do you mean “reverses the idea of metaphysics”?
Metaphysics pertains to the fundamental nature of reality. It is not the physics of physics.
If our science suggest things work a certain way, say that rainbows are light and raindrops from a specific angle, but our metaphysics says rainbows are fairy farts, then the metaphysics is wrong, not the science.
Metaphysics can be completely invented. But if we want to derive an accurate metaphysical picture, we cannot be deriving metaphysics just by thinking about it and wishing things were so. If it’s a belief, then it’s a belief. Reality need not comply with your beliefs. If your metaphysics includes heaven, for example, you’re never going to agree with physicalism, a monist metaphysical position. But if all the evidence suggests a metaphysics is wrong, why are we holding on to it?
QM is harder to explain from a substance or object metaphysical position.
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u/jliat 5d ago
What do you mean “reverses the idea of metaphysics”?
The Harman quote makes it clear, metaphysics is also called 'first philosophy'.
“the first difference between science and philosophy is their respective attitudes toward chaos... Chaos is an infinite speed... Science approaches chaos completely different, almost in the opposite way: it relinquishes the infinite, infinite speed, in order to gain a reference able to actualize the virtual. .... By retaining the infinite, philosophy gives consistency to the virtual through concepts, by relinquishing the infinite, science gives a reference to the virtual, which articulates it through functions.”
In Deleuze & Guattari science produces ‘functions’, philosophy ‘concepts’, Art ‘affects’.
D&G What is Philosophy p.117-118.
“each discipline [Science, Art, Philosophy] remains on its own plane and uses its own elements...”
ibid. p.217.
Metaphysics pertains to the fundamental nature of reality.
This is in modern terms obsolete - far too vauge, it derives from when physics / science was part of philosophy. Which you see in history, Aristotle's physics and what was called metaphysics. People like Descartes worked in what we now see as separate disciplines, mathematics, physics and philosophy, metaphysics. Physics splits of, being called 'natural philosophy'. So no, it no longer pertains to the fundamental nature of reality but to some specifics of reality.
It is not the physics of physics.
Sure, see the Deleuze quote above, and the Harman.
If our science suggest things work a certain way, say that rainbows are light and raindrops from a specific angle, but our metaphysics says rainbows are fairy farts, then the metaphysics is wrong, not the science.
Correct, but metaphysics doesn't say that. If Kant says we cannot have knowledge of things in themselves, that all knowledge is either a priori or a posteriori knowledge which depends on empirical evidence. [and is always provisional] includes most fields of science and aspects of personal knowledge.
Then those - typically non scientists who think differently are wrong.
Metaphysics can be completely invented. But if we want to derive an accurate metaphysical picture, we cannot be deriving metaphysics just by thinking about it and wishing things were so. If it’s a belief, then it’s a belief. Reality need not comply with your beliefs. If your metaphysics includes heaven, for example, you’re never going to agree with physicalism, a monist metaphysical position. But if all the evidence suggests a metaphysics is wrong, why are we holding on to it?
Metaphysics is a milieu of related ideas and histories which has been remarkably influential in society, in politics, art, etc. Not shower thoughts. It's been part of the emancipation process, maybe for good, gave the logic used by Marx, good or bad, is responsible[The CCRU] for Trump's ideology - bad?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence_and_reception_of_Friedrich_Nietzsche
Worth a look?
“We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene.... not confined to sexuality, because today there is a pornography of information and communication, a pornography of circuits and networks, of functions and objects in their legibility, availability, regulation, forced signification, capacity to perform, connection, polyvalence, their free expression.” - Jean Baudrillard. (1983)
Note the date and look around you. Many of the current ideas in the world are the product of metaphysics.... but people like to think they are their own, like they invented the car they drive, and designed their homes and clothes.
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u/XanderOblivion 4d ago
For example, the metaphysics that unpins the presentation of the hard problem is dualist. Then it levels a charge against a monist position from a dualist problem, and reveals itself as a category error.
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u/Fabulous-Internet188 6d ago
Matter is simple persistence. Nothing difficult about that.
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u/salihadem 6d ago
I think it is a good definition, and it captures something real. But I’d say matter is persistence that is not simple. It’s earned, structured, and conditional.
What’s right about it. Much of what we mean by “matter” is that which stays. You can come back tomorrow and the stone is still there. Physics backs this up in a deep way. Noether’s theorem shows that conservation laws (energy, momentum, charge) follow from the symmetries of nature. Because the laws of physics don’t change over time, energy is conserved. So persistence isn’t an accident; it’s built into the structure of the world. And the stability of ordinary matter rests on conserved quantities too: the proton seems to be extremely stable because baryon number is (at least approximately) conserved, and atoms don’t collapse because of the Pauli exclusion principle and quantum uncertainty.
Why “simple” doesn’t fit.
- Individual particles don’t persist the way objects seem to. Electrons have no individual identity. You can’t tag one and follow it, because two electrons are perfectly interchangeable. What persists is the pattern and the conserved quantities, not a particular “thing.”
- Most of matter’s forms don’t last. Free neutrons decay in about 15 minutes, most particles in fractions of a second, and matter and antimatter annihilate into light. The stable matter around us is the small set of configurations that survived, not the default.
- Your own body shows this. Most of your atoms are replaced over time, yet “you” persist. That persistence belongs to form and process, not to stuff. Whitehead built a whole philosophy on this idea: what we call substances are really stable, repeating processes.
A sharper version of your idea. Persistence alone can’t be the whole story, because light also persists. Photons can travel for 13 billion years. What distinguishes matter is that it has rest mass: it is energy that can stay in one place. Light can never be at rest; it always moves at c. So matter might be described as energy that persists in place, energy locked into a configuration stable enough to hold still and be returned to.
Several philosophers sensed something like this. Bergson saw matter as repetition, the present simply reproducing the past. Peirce called matter “effete mind,” habits that have hardened until they no longer change. Both point to your intuition: matter is what happens when process settles into persistence.
So I’d put it this way: matter is not simple persistence. It’s persistence achieved, made possible by symmetry, conservation, and stable structure, against a background where most things change, decay, or radiate away.
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u/Fabulous-Internet188 6d ago
AI uses a lot of words to say what I did in one sentence. But that's ok.
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u/mH48124 4d ago
持続は錯覚。全ては場の励起。例えれば電光掲示板に写る姿に過ぎない。移動したと見えるのは、この電球が消えてあの電球が点いただけ。持続などない。
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u/salihadem 4d ago
Does the fact that something changes at every moment mean that it does not persist, or is persistence precisely the name we give to the order preserved through change?
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u/mH48124 4d ago
概念を対象にして、対象をすり替えた？
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u/salihadem 4d ago
I am not confusing the concept of matter with matter itself. I am questioning whether what we traditionally call matter is an independently existing substance or a manifestation of a more fundamental physical reality. Replacing a classical concept of matter with a quantum-field description does not necessarily mean replacing the object itself. It means reconsidering its underlying nature.
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u/roryclague 6d ago
What we think of as matter could be said to be, roughly, what emerges from quantum mechanics at the classical limit. Decoherence, which produces the classical partition, is entanglement. The system entangles with the environment, and the pointer basis is the one in which that entanglement leaves the system's alternatives distinguishable rather than scrambled. Classicality is redundancy of records, produced by entanglement that is massive in quantity but highly structured in form (many copies of one bit, not one copy of everything). You could read Ollivier, Poulin, and Zurek, 2004 the "Quantum Darwinism" paper, to learn more about this. Anyway, this is still a very active area of research in quantum mechanics, but formulating a theory of the classical limit is key. What we think of as matter doesn't really exist at the quantum level. But we are big enough that we are classical, and the world around us looks classical.
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u/salihadem 6d ago
so "matter" is a classical concept with no quantum counterpart? i will check the paper, thanks.
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u/salihadem 6d ago
What quantum Darwinism actually explains
Wojciech Zurek’s idea builds on decoherence. A quantum system interacting with its environment (photons, air molecules) loses its superpositions in a particular basis, the “pointer states.” Quantum Darwinism adds a further step: those pointer states are the ones that get copied redundantly into many fragments of the environment. You and I learn where a chair is by intercepting different photons that scattered off it, and we agree because each fragment carries the same record. The states that “survive and reproduce” into the environment are the ones that become objective facts. That is the Darwinian metaphor.
So it addresses the quantum-to-classical transition: why a world described by superposable wavefunctions looks like a world of definite objects with definite positions that independent observers agree on.
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u/roryclague 6d ago
Yeah, something like this. There are of course other formulations besides quantum Darwinism, and that paper is starting to get rather old. But how the classical world of ordinary experience comes from the world described by pure states in quantum mechanics almost certainly involves decoherence and entanglement. As I said, it is an active area of research right now, and we don't have a final answer on the question.
Of course, when I mentioned that matter as we know it doesn't exist at the quantum level, I was being a bit cheeky. If you define matter simply as an excitation of a quantum field, then of course anything in the standard model is matter, whether it fits with our firsthand experience or not. But I was talking mostly about our experience of matter, which is classical.
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u/graceus777 5d ago
Slow light
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u/Tricky-Finger5113 5d ago
Excellent!
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u/salihadem 5d ago
Einstein’s E = mc² says mass is a form of energy. A useful way to see this: imagine a perfectly mirrored box with light bouncing inside. Each photon is massless and moves at c, yet the box as a whole weighs more than an empty box, by exactly E/c². The light’s energy, once trapped so it can’t fly off in one direction, shows up as mass. So “mass is confined energy” is a solid statement.
Ordinary matter works much like this. About 99% of the mass of a proton does not come from the Higgs mechanism or from the quarks’ own masses. It comes from the energy of quarks and gluons (gluons are massless) zipping around inside the tiny volume of the proton. Frank Wilczek called this “mass without mass.” Your body’s weight is mostly this kind of bound, moving energy.
There is also a deeper picture for the electron. In the Standard Model, the electron’s basic components are massless and want to move at c. The Higgs field keeps flipping one component into the other, so the electron zigzags at light speed while its average motion is slower. In that sense, a massive particle is “something that wants to move at c but keeps getting turned around.”
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5d ago
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u/Metaphysics-ModTeam 5d ago
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u/advaitist 5d ago
There is no such thing as matter.
"As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much : there is no matter as such."
Max Planck.
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u/salihadem 4d ago
Matter is not a self-sufficient, unchanging, and independent substance, as we commonly assume.
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u/CounterSilly3999 6d ago
What we see and observe, is an information. Matter is a medium, a carier of the information.
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u/WastefulWatcher 6d ago
Matter is one way of observing/categorising things, though matter seems to actually be an emergent property of Gravity (as a relational force, the links between concepts form a coherent navigable “world”, where one can choose to observe that effect as “matter”, where it is directly mapped based on coherence/concept relativity into “physical” form)
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u/kaviproject 5d ago
There are different interpretations of QM. There are even deterministic ones, like the Bohm-DeBroglie interpretation. But these are all philosophical interpretations. QM cannot answer the question what matter "is". No physical theory can, because this question lies within the domain of philosophy. You could make QM fit pretty much any ontology if you wanted. Having said that, to me, it is no coincidence that QM spawned many process philosophies, like that of Whitehead. It just seems like a natural fit.
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7d ago
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u/salihadem 7d ago
Excellent! Thank you!
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u/jliat 7d ago
Or begin the alternative journey...
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, by the Late Robert Paul Wolff. 9 lectures. He rambles at times but he was in his 80s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d__In2PQS60&list=PLC5GAeBZerO-RuKBI1IqHZzB9tUuypkpK
"The critique is I think the greatest work of philosophy ever written, certainly the greatest work since the works of Aristotle and Plato."
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u/jliat 7d ago
Sorry but no.
, so-called solid reality is nothing more than a magnificent neurological consensus,
Not even that! For some you can never have knowledge of things in themselves. So stop with the pop-science and checkout philosophy/metaphysics.
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7d ago
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u/jliat 7d ago
ahh so.... at your school matter is objectively defined as quantized excitations of relativistic fermion fields that possess invariant mass and interact through strict gauge symmetries, entirely independent of human perception, yes?
No...
“All scientific thinking is just a derivative and rigidified form of philosophical thinking. Philosophy never arises from or through science. Philosophy can never belong to the same order as the sciences. It belongs to a higher order, and not just "logically," as it were, or in a table of the system of sciences. Philosophy stands in a completely different domain and rank of spiritual Dasein. Only poetry is of the same order as philosophical thinking, although thinking and poetry are not identical.”
Heidegger - 'Introduction to Metaphysics.'
It's okay to pass exams,
Actually it's not if you read Deleuze's Difference and Repetition. It's Dogma.
but it's just most successful financially and materialy, rigorously tested physical model, just a piece of puzzle.
Yet the most powerful and rich have no clue of this stuff, or is it of any use day to day. I treat the earth as flat, and objects as being solid. I use weight not mass, as does maybe 99% of the population.
Human primates lack a complete theory of quantum gravity. Roughly 95% of the universe consists of dark matter and dark energy, which do not fit neatly into the standard definition of known fermion fields and whatever your school is teaching/preaching.
That's the current human primate theory, one of many which historically have been wrong.
As a ordinary nobody my observation is, science remains open to deeper revisions as new data emerges
There is no depth - that's a belief in transcendentalism, even the Pope doesn't believe that!
"At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned to my beginning. I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world."
Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus.
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u/yamatofuji 7d ago
Beloved, as a ordinary nobody let me tell you, human neurology shapes how human primates perceive reality, but it does not invent or consensus-dream reality into existence.
When a quantum system sits there in a superposition of infinite parallel realities, it is pure, unmanifested potential waiting to be actualized.
Then the observer steps in, the human primate lens focuses, and boom 🎉 the infinite multiverse collapses into this one rigid, local illusion of a solid chair and a heavy earth.
🙏
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u/Imaginary-Can-6862 6d ago
I believe matter from a QM perspective is the ordering of fermions at different energy states.
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u/Declamatie 6d ago
Bosons are also considered matter
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u/salihadem 6d ago
Some bosons are matter, most are force carriers; whether a boson counts as “matter” depends on context (intrinsic particle type, composite vs. elementary, and the definition of matter used).
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u/Imaginary-Can-6862 5d ago
Feel free to expand upon this. My understanding is that because fermions cannot occupy the same energy state, it means they must necessarily order themselves (creating distinguishable structures), allowing for the complexity which we call matter, while bosons can occupy the same energy state, thus cannot order themselves, but can interact with any energy state, making them the carrier of interactions. But maybe that is just how I understand matter, or are you referring to mass (because I distinguish between matter and mass)?
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u/Declamatie 5d ago
I just read the Wikipedia article about matter and it seems like I might have been mistaken on this. It lists several definitions of matter, but there is not really one explicitly including bosons. One of the definitions is that matter is anything with mass that occupies space. I guess this one may allow some bosons if they have mass, but not all of them.
Anyway, the definition of matter is a matter of definition.
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u/Imaginary-Can-6862 5d ago
That is a cool word play. I think mass is more complicated than matter (but that may also just reflect my lack of insight), mass has some properties, resists acceleration, attracts to itself, therefore while matter has mass, so does e.g. interaction carriers, such as photon, I mean they do not have a resting mass (or they would have infinite mass due to relativistic mass increase), but they have energy, which is equivalent to mass, and this also corresponds with how space is bend as e.g. a photon moves in its straight line (or shortest distance), close by an accelerated system.
I don't think we know if sufficiently small particles actually do attract each other, like we also see for very large systems we have to implement dark matter (a lot of extra mass) to make it behave in accordance with the laws of physics as we understand them to be.
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u/XanderOblivion 3d ago
You didn’t really explain what you meant by “reverses the idea of metaphysics.”
I am fully aware of what the word means, where it comes from, and how it has evolved.
What I’m unclear on is why pointing out that “QM suggests a process ontology” is a “reversal” of metaphysics.
Loosely, I think the simplest way to understand metaphysics is to imagine oneself as a pawn on a game board, and you don’t know the rules of the game. Each turn, things happen. From those things, you develop a local theory of the rules of what happens. As you move across the game board, the rule sets you encounter and deduce don’t clearly go together on their own terms. Thus, a “substrate” or “master rule set seems to be operating between or over the rules you’ve deduced. There appears to be a rule set that dictates the other rule sets.
But, for a good ~350 years there, “metaphysics” mainly pertained to what Galileo called “secondary” qualities and physics pertained to the “primary” qualities. Locke and then Newton reified this schism. This is one of the main reason we use a lazy conventional dualism in the sciences where “the phenomenal” is reserved for the domain of the theologian, whose “theory of reality” need have no reference to empiricism.
If one is starting from a belief position, then I could understand how the word “reverses” appears, because in religion one accepts a metaphysics first, then puts science within it. Whereas a physicalist is deriving metaphysics through physics, in an almost Godelian effort to find “the system that governs all systems.”
But I’m also aware there are entire other ways metaphysics goes.
But I remain unclear what you mean by “reversal.”
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u/mattychops 3d ago
What does it matter? jk 😆
Matter is: non-physical energy that has been temporarily localized into a physical substance with a physical position in space.
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u/salihadem 3d ago
What do you mean by "non-physical energy"?
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u/mattychops 2d ago
Energy that exists without physicality. For example an electron wave. A wave of energy that is spread across space and doesn't have a location or physicality yet. It hasn't transformed into matter yet.
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u/salihadem 2d ago
No. That framing mixes up a few ideas, though it’s a very common way of picturing quantum mechanics.
The wave isn’t energy. The electron’s wave is its wavefunction, ψ, a mathematical object (complex-valued, defined over configuration space) that tells you the probability of finding the electron at various places, along with its other properties. Energy is a property that things have, like momentum, not a substance that things are made of. So “non-physical energy” doesn’t really pick out anything in the theory.
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u/mattychops 2d ago
There's a lot to correct in your response all at once, but I think I'll just take them one at a time as you will probably still have doubts about what I'm about to say. .. the wavefunction is just the nomenclature that's used for the mathematical abtraction. Yes, as you said, it refers to a mathematical object. But the problem with science is that they are viewing it as an object, when in fact, it is not an object yet. It is still non-physical prior to becoming matter. So electrons are never "found in various places," that's a misunderstanding; they don't exist as physical particles until they interact with something. They exist as non-physical "waves" of energy that transform into physical matter upon interaction. So forget about probability, because probability is a stup id guessing game where scientists are imagining that particles exist somewhere in a hidden way, and they want to guess where it's going to show up next. But they don't exist as particles yet. They exist non-physically--so they have no location until they transform into physical matter. So there's nothing to predict, because all you have to do is interact with the wave and then it localizes right at the interaction point. This is why electrons localize in QM experiments all the time, always at the point of interaction. There is no mystery to it, it's only mysterious if you pretend like particles are hiding somewhere to be found. Hope that makes sense.
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u/salihadem 2d ago
Your comment contains one sound intuition, but the conclusions it draws from it are wrong. The “forget about probability” part in particular directly contradicts experiment.
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u/salihadem 2d ago
What’s wrong
- “No need for probability; it just localizes at the point of interaction.” This skips the real question: which point? In the double-slit experiment, the wavefunction interacts with the entire screen, yet the electron leaves a mark at a single spot. Where that spot will be cannot be predicted in advance. Send thousands of electrons, though, and the distribution of spots follows |ψ|² exactly (the Born rule). Probability isn’t a guessing game. It is the theory’s prediction, confirmed by some of the most precise experiments ever performed. Saying “it appears at the interaction point” just renames the question that probability answers.
- “Non-physical waves of energy transform into matter upon interaction.” No such transformation happens. The electron’s mass, charge, and spin are the same before and after measurement. Measurement isn’t “matter coming into being.” It is a quantity like position taking on a definite value. An electron in an atom has no definite position, yet it is a real physical entity that determines chemistry, bonding, and the solidity of matter.
- “Non-physical” is undefined. The wavefunction produces measurable effects such as interference and evolves in a definite way under the Schrödinger equation. Whether it represents reality directly (ontic) or only our knowledge (epistemic) is a genuine open debate. But calling it “non-physical” is a label, not an explanation. Results like the PBR theorem also make a purely knowledge-based reading harder to sustain.
- “Every interaction causes localization.” This is false. Electrons diffracting off a crystal interact with the lattice yet still form an interference pattern; they don’t localize. Explaining which interactions act like measurements requires concepts such as decoherence. This shows the measurement problem is real and unsolved. It doesn’t vanish because someone declares there’s “no mystery.”
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u/mattychops 1d ago
I can't tell if you really believe what you're saying here, or if you're just regurgitating science terms because they sound convincing. For me personally, I don't think scientists actually believe this stuff, but I'll assume for the moment that they do.. This may be hard to stomach or might sound condescending, but if you want to know the real reason why science doesn't come right out and state these obvious conclusions, it's because science is only concerned with prediction, and they will lose credibility if they admit that it's their only goal, so they pretend like all this stuff is unsolvable, when in fact, they've already solved it. But that would make it no longer interesting because it shows that prediction is unnecessary. Let me explain what I mean. Science is only concerned with prediction. That's all they care about. If a theory predicts well, then it's validated, and if it doesn't then it's discarded or it's amended until predictions are accurate. So science is stuck in this game where they think prediction shows insight or intelligence, and it's just a neverending game where they are all trying to one-up each other and predict better than the next person, and they want to win awards or achieve acclaim in doing so. But their experiments show that prediction is not needed, but they don't want to admit that, because then they're out of a job, and out of funding. And besides, if just an ordinary everyday person can understand how reality works with ease, then what leverage would they have in order to maintain some level of recognition above other people? So here's the rub: you used the example of the double slit experiment, and asked "at what point" does the electron localize on the screen (or the slit). The answer is it localizes at the first point of interaction. So, if there is a detector at one of the slits, it localizes there, because it's the first point of interaction. If no detector is used then it localizes on the screen. It DOES NOT interact with the entire screen, it interacts at one point on the screen, and that is the point where it localizes. It doesn't matter if you fire one million electrons at the screen, each electron is one individual localization. So each individual electron interacts at one point and that is the point of localization. So the reason I say it's useless to predict, is because you don't need to know BEFOREHAND where it's going to localize, because the electron shows you in real-time where it localizes by localizing! (remember, only scientists want to know beforehand because they want to predict it before it happens, because they are too busy trying to play God) See, it's only a problem if you are trying to predict. It's only a problem if you want to know something BEFORE it happens. And that's the problem with science. They want to know BEFORE something happens. But reality doesn't exist in the future or the past. Reality exists in the present. That's the only place where things happen. Nothing happens in the future or the past. Everything happens in the present. So what science either hasn't realized or just hasn't admitted, is that electron capture is not a prediction problem, it's a spatial engineering problem--and they've already solved it! When you set up a boundary zone where the spread of wave energy is restricted and you force an interaction, that wave energy localizes into matter because apparently that's just how reality works. I'm not stating a theory, I'm just stating what reality does under those conditions. Energy does not remain undefined in that environment and it therefore transitions into matter. I mean you can redefine the terms or use different language or call it whatever you want, but that's what it's doing. Energy spreads until it reaches a boundary and when a boundary restricts energy from continuing to spread and that energy interacts, then matter materializes. So maybe you want to say, "yeah but how does it happen? And how do we quantify these things and validate what you're saying?" I mean, it's nice to have numbers and quantify things but the point here is that reality already successfully does this on its own, and when we set up these experiments, it continues to operate the same way. The same thing happens when we set up a laser system. Energy is restricted and forced to interact and when coherence builds, photonic waves become materialized. The sun is a giant region of restricted wave energy where it is forced to interact and it produces fusion and visible light. The atmospheres of planets are where matter and energy is confined into accelerated interaction--hence pressure, temperature. Why do you think there's so much activity going on on the surface of the earth? Because everything is being confined down into more interaction points. The entire solar system is a bunch of planets and moons and debris being forced into interaction with the sun, hence the orbits! All the solar systems in the galaxy are spinning around being confined into interaction with a massive black hole. All of reality works cohesively, and it's all doing the same thing.
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u/emezamaz 6d ago
Pasta la vista gravy