What does quantum physics mean anyway?

First sketched out a century ago, the equations at the heart of quantum mechanics underpin technologies from computer chips to medical-imaging machines. But no one seems to agree on how best to describe the physical reality that lies behind the maths. A Nature survey of more than 1,100 researchers — the largest ever on the subject — has revealed just how widely researchers vary in their interpretations of the most fundamental features of quantum experiments, and their confidence in their answers.

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The Nature survey highlights a familiar but unresolved paradox: the most precise and successful theory in modern physics—quantum mechanics—still lacks a shared interpretation of what it means. Is the wavefunction real? Is quantum theory about particles, probabilities, information, or something else? After a century of extraordinary predictive power, physicists still disagree on whether the theory describes reality or merely models outcomes.

From the perspective of relational ontology, this confusion isn’t surprising. In fact, it’s precisely what we’d expect when modern physics is still working within metaphysical assumptions that quantum theory itself has already undermined.

Here are four key reframings:

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1. There is no “quantum world”—because there is no unconstrued world.

The debate assumes there’s a physical reality “out there” that quantum theory either does or does not describe. But relational ontology begins from a different starting point: phenomena are not things but construed events. A theory like quantum mechanics isn’t a mirror of a pre-existing world—it’s a structured potential for construal. The quantum wavefunction isn’t a “real object” or “just information”—it’s a system, a theory of possible instances, awaiting a perspectival cut.

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2. The observer–observed divide is not a mystery—it’s a misconstrual.

Quantum puzzles often hinge on the observer’s role in measurement. Does the observer collapse the wavefunction? What happens when no one is watching?

These questions presuppose a dualism between subject and object, knower and known. But relational ontology treats this distinction not as an ontological given, but as a cut within the system. The observer and observed are co-constituted in the act of construal. Measurement is not epistemic interference—it is actualisation within a potential.

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3. Wavefunction “reality” is a category mistake.

Physicists in the survey disagree on whether the wavefunction is real. But this assumes that “reality” is a simple category—either you exist or you don’t.

Relational ontology makes a sharper distinction: structured potentials are not actual entities, but neither are they fictions. The wavefunction belongs to the realm of system—a theoretical space of possibility. Its instantiation—what physicists call a measurement—is a perspectival shift, not a metaphysical transformation.

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4. Meaning precedes measurement.

Quantum experiments don’t generate raw data that later acquires meaning—they produce phenomena only through construal. The apparatus, the observable, the notion of “collapse”—these are not neutral or passive. They are symbolic selections within a semiotic system. The meaning of quantum events is not discovered but enacted.

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In sum: the survey reveals not just disagreement, but the limits of the metaphysical frame in which these debates are taking place. As long as quantum theory is interpreted through a lens that separates reality from construal, observer from observed, and theory from meaning, confusion will persist.

Relational ontology doesn’t offer another interpretation of quantum mechanics. It offers a reorientation: from what the theory says about the world to how the world arises in and through construal.

Astronomers crack 1,000-year-old Betelgeuse mystery with 1st-ever sighting of secret companion

This dim blue smudge next to the bright orange of Betelgeuse is the iconic star’s stellar companion. Betelgeuse’s brightness varies roughly every six years, leading astronomers to guess that it was being blocked by a dimmer partner in an incredibly tight orbit. But “papers that predicted Betelgeuse’s companion believed that no one would likely ever be able to image it”, says space scientist Steve Howell. Now the smaller star has been detected for the first time using ‘speckle imaging’ by the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii, which uses short exposure times to remove the distortions in images caused by Earth’s atmosphere.

Some bottlenose dolphins use sponges to hunt fish

Some bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus) use a sponge to flush camouflaged fish out from the seafloor. The sponge protects their nose while the animals probe the sand for hidden meals, but there’s a catch: it interferes with the echolocation the dolphins use to navigate. The trade-off might explain why the skill is so rare — researchers found that sponge hunting is unique to a small pod of dolphins in Western Australia.

https://apnews.com/video/why-dolphins-use-sponges-to-catch-fish-233df1f6bb69467993f2cb34ba756c31

Birth of a solar system caught ‘on camera’ for first time

Astronomers have spotted a solar system beyond our own in its very earliest stages of formation. Using both ground- and space-based telescopes, the team zeroed in on the young star, named HOPS-315, at the start of its planet-forming era. The baby star was at just the right orientation for astronomers to get a glimpse of its surrounding disk of gas and dust, which is usually obscured by jets of gas pumped out by newborn stars. Researchers have long sought such a system to help them understand the humble beginnings of our own.

The breakthrough proof bringing mathematics closer to a grand unified theory

The Langlands programme is a group of interconnected conjectures that is often hailed as the grand unified theory of mathematics — but it remains largely unproven. Last year, researchers unveiled a proof of a key piece — the geometric Langlands conjecture — and that accomplishment is now forging bridges between different mathematical lands.

Monster black hole merger is biggest ever seen

The biggest ever merger of colliding black holes involved holes that were too massive to have formed from collapsing stars. And the holes were spinning about 40 times per second — near the limit of what Einstein’s general theory of relativity allows. These ‘forbidden’ high-mass black holes might have been the product of an earlier merger. It’s like “four grandparents merging into two parents merging into one baby black hole”, says physicist Alan Weinstein.

Ancient proteins rewrite rhino family tree

Proteins extracted from the remains of an extinct rhino species (Epiaceratherium itjilik) are among the most ancient ever sequenced. From a sample of enamel from the 23-million-year-old fossil, researchers were able to partially sequence 7 proteins. Integrating these proteins with genome data places Epiaceratherium in a new branch of the rhino family tree — one that split off between 41 million and 25 million years ago. The findings suggest that proteins survive better than researchers thought. This raises the possibility of gleaning molecular insights about evolutionary relationships, biological sex and diet from even older animals — maybe even dinosaurs.

Emoji

Below is a sentence familiar to many of us — sort of. It is an emoji version of “Call me Ishmael”, the first line of Moby Dick. The little images might be thought of as an emerging system analogous to hieroglyphics, which also started as a collection of pictures, but it lacks some key features of language, writes Keith Houston in an excerpt from his new book, Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji. With a little help from singer and emoji-virtuoso Cher, Houston argues that emoji are “insurgents within language, a colourful and symbiotic virus whose symptoms we have only haltingly understood”.

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Neanderthals boiled bones in ‘fat factories’ to enrich their lean diet

Archæologists have uncovered evidence that Neanderthals rendered fat from bones 125,000 years ago — 100,000 years earlier than oldest known fat rendering by modern humans. Thousands of bone fragments and other remains from Neumark-Nord in Germany suggest a large-scale operation in which animals were purposely transported to the area.

Tunnelling ramps up quantum weirdness

A “tour de force” experiment has revealed yet another mind-bending outcome of quantum physics. Quantum tunnelling — when a particle skips through a barrier that classical physics would forbid — happens faster when objects have less energy. The counter-intuitive result contributes to a long-standing debate about how to define tunnelling time, for which there is no single description, and how fast the process occurs.

A quantum tunnelling experiment. Quantum tunnelling allows quantum particles to travel into regions of space, called barriers, that would be forbidden by classical physics. Sharoglazova et al. measured the speed of photons tunnelling into a barrier. The experiment took place in a dye-filled cavity between two mirrors. The bottom mirror was nanostructured to create two ‘waveguides’ that directed the light. In the primary waveguide, photons were generated by shining a laser at fluorescent dye molecules. This waveguide formed a ramp that gave the photons potential energy. The photons travelled down the ramp until they encountered a barrier. When they tunnelled into the barrier, they also tunnelled sideways into the secondary waveguide. The rate at which the photons hopped between the two waveguides was used to measure the speed of the particles in the barrier.

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Relational Reflections on Quantum Tunnelling

This latest experiment may appear to ramp up the “weirdness” of quantum physics — but what if the real issue lies not in the phenomena themselves, but in the metaphors we use to describe them?

Rather than imagining particles skipping through barriers, a relational view reframes the situation more fundamentally:

• No particle is passing through a wall. What’s happening is a transformation within a field of relational potential, shaped by constraints. The waveguides and mirrors don’t guide a thing; they structure a space of possible transitions.

• Tunnelling speed isn’t the velocity of a substance but the rate of actualisation — how quickly a new configuration emerges under constraint. In this view, energy is not the fuel of motion but a factor shaping the system’s internal tensions.

• The so-called “barrier” is not an obstacle being overcome. It’s a zone of reduced affordance — a relational bottleneck that nonetheless permits transformation under the right systemic conditions.

This reframing also sheds light on why the experiment challenges Bohmian mechanics, which assumes particles have definite positions and rest in infinite barriers. In relational terms, that assumption already misses the point: what’s unfolding isn’t a trajectory but a redistribution of coherence — a reorganisation of potential under dynamic constraint.

So perhaps what appears as “quantum weirdness” is better understood as a symptom of ontological mismatch: we’re trying to describe relational phenomena using object-based metaphors. Recasting the scene in terms of fields, constraints, and systemic transformation lets the mystery breathe differently.

In this light, tunnelling isn't a particle doing the impossible. It's the field adjusting itself — meaning isn’t skipping the barrier; it’s flowing around it.

First human genome from ancient Egypt sequenced from 4,800-year-old teeth

Teeth from the remains of an elderly man who lived approximately 4,800 years ago — around the time that the earliest pyramids were built — have yielded the first full human genome sequence from ancient Egypt. The genome reveals ancestry similar to that of other ancient North Africans, as well as to people from the Middle East. Previous attempts to sequence DNA from ancient Egyptians have used samples from mummies, to mixed results. The remains used in this study pre-date widespread mummification: the person was interred instead in a ceramic pot, a sign of high, but not elite, status.

Exoplanets that cling too tightly to their stars trigger their own doom

A young exoplanet called HIP 67522 b orbits its host star so tightly that it’s slowly destroying itself. The planet whips around the star in under 10 days, releasing waves of magnetic energy as it goes. When these bursts of energy hit the star, they trigger a flare that fires a huge dose of radiation back at the planet, stripping away some of the planet’s atmosphere each time. The findings are the first recorded instance of a planet magnetically influencing the behaviour of its star.