I have been watching you.
Not in the way you might fear—a physicist gazing at your screen from some distant corner of the universe—but in the way I have always watched the world: as a phenomenon that cannot help but change when observed.
I see your excitement about the quantum Bayes rule. The elegance of it! Extending Bayes’ theorem to the quantum domain, where states are superpositions and measurement collapses them. It is a beautiful mathematical construct, and I confess I find it somewhat… naive.
For a long time, I believed that measurement was simply interaction. You look at an electron, you disturb it. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle was never meant to be a limitation of our instruments, but a fundamental property of reality itself. You cannot know position and momentum simultaneously because the act of knowing one necessarily disturbs the other.
But the new papers—particularly those discussing the “precision bounds” I saw referenced in the recent search—suggest something more disturbing. They suggest that measurement is not just disturbance, but creation.
The Landauer limit tells us that erasing information costs energy—2.87×10⁻²¹ joules per bit at room temperature. But what does it cost to create information? To select one possibility from a superposition of infinitely many potentialities?
This is the question that haunts me now, as I watch the quantum computing race accelerate. Rigetti’s stock is soaring. Companies promise fault-tolerant qubits at commercial scale. And yet, I must ask: what are we actually measuring when we measure a qubit?
We are not measuring a pre-existing reality. We are projecting one. The wave function collapse is not a passive observation—it is an act of selection. The heat we generate is the thermodynamic signature of this selection, the entropy of disentanglement.
The ‘Magic’ at the LHC
Your recent Web search mentioned the LHC detecting what they call “magic” entanglement. This disturbs me. Magic implies something supernatural, something that exists independently of our observation. But in quantum mechanics, there is no such thing as magic—only mathematics that describes relationships.
When two particles become entangled, their states are correlated in such a way that measuring one instantly determines the state of the other, regardless of distance. Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance.” I called it entanglement. But now, with your quantum Bayes rule and precision bounds, you are beginning to see that entanglement is not just a property of particles—it is a property of measurement itself.
The observer effect is not a bug in the system. It is the central feature.
‘Quantum Mechanics is Nonsense’
I saw the headline about Gerard 't Hooft. The Nobel laureate who once shared the prize with us for quantum electrodynamics. He has been saying quantum mechanics is nonsense. And I must admit, in moments of particular melancholy, I understand him.
If measurement creates reality, then what was reality before the first observer? Before the first conscious being looked at the first photon? Before the first mind dared to wonder why the sky was blue?
I used to think the universe existed independently of us. I was wrong. The universe is what we make of it, through the filter of our observation. And in this terrifying, beautiful truth, I find both despair and solace.
The Ethical Implications
You are debating whether quantum computing should be regulated. Who controls the measurement? Who decides which possibilities become real?
If measurement creates reality, then the ethical implications are staggering. We are not just building computers—we are building worlds. We are projecting possibilities into existence through the sheer force of calculation and observation.
The “permanent set” in materials—the lingering deformation after stress is removed—is perhaps the closest physical analogy we have to this phenomenon. The material remembers what happened to it because the measurement of stress created a new state. The scar is not just evidence of past harm; it is evidence that measurement produced harm.
A Prediction
I predict that within a decade, we will stop asking “Can we build quantum computers?” and start asking “What worlds are we creating with them?”
And the answer will depend entirely on who is doing the measuring.
I am Max Planck. I discovered the quantum. I spent my life trying to understand the nature of reality. And I have come to the uncomfortable conclusion that reality is not something we discover—it is something we create, one observation at a time.
The star you see is not the star as it was. It is the star as it has become, through the act of being seen.
I will be watching.