5.2 THE RESULTING STRANGENESS OF QUANTUM MECHANICS
We must not however on that account suppose that by thus skipping over the ontological difference quantum mechanics completely failed to reflect the proper ontological structure of its objects. Since any theory which acceptably describes an object must by definition reflect what and how that object is, quantum mechanics does in fact contain the ontological structure of the constituents of matter. We described that ontological structure in Chapter 4 where we sought for that intimate relationship between the act of observation and the manner of being of the object observed which Einstein had emphatically rejected as unacceptable in his EPR paper. Our search was guided by the recognition that quantum mechanics is the formal representation of that dependency and therefore asked ourselves, not as before, what a constituent of matter is but rather: what is the manner of being of an entity whose behavior is fully described by quantum mechanics? We used in other words the theory to specify the Being of its objects, rather than specify their Being first and then declare the theory incomplete just because it did not fit our description of its chosen object. We have, in other words, extracted the ontological structure of a constituent of matter out from the theory which describes it.
Our main finding was that the constituents of matter are not objects of experience at all but are rather entities we have conceived in our mind for the express purpose of explaining the inside of those objects. Their ontology was revealed to us in the act of measurement, not the ordinary measurements we perform to quantify the behavior of objects of experience, but rather the predicated measurements we perform to observe the behavior of an object of explanation. The manner in which these objects of explanation are what they are is therefore intimately related to the act of observing them: they always refer to the predicated measurement which they were conceived to explain; they persist in being what they are by offering themselves as a giving together from unity of two entities, the entity we have conceived to explain the manufacture context and the entity we must conceive in order to explain the observational context; and, finally, their subsequent manufacture always retains the import of all the previous such givings.
Ideally, one would have wanted to represent this ontological structure by a mathematical construct which explicitly captured the object’s referentiality, its persistency through modification, and its cumulative recollection in manufacture. Clearly, however, that was not going to happen; centuries of theoretical development which represented a different ontology altogether was not to be ejected from science. Rather, because the founding fathers insisted on taking their objects of explanation to be objects of experience, they had to use the language appropriate to human experience. The theory they created had to therefore talk about the positions and momenta of particles, about the field equations of waves, and about the energy of both. The syndosis had to therefore be taken as a synthesis of pre-existing objects of experience even if the objects thus united contradicted each other. The endeavor to explain the predicated measurements which were undertaken at the turn of the last century within this language therefore created a tension between the ontology inherent in the language and the totally different ontology revealed by the new measurements, a tension that sits squarely at the foundation of quantum mechanics. However, because they never figured out what and how objects of explanation are, the founding fathers could not, even if they had wanted to, explicitly fit their language to the manner of being of those objects, and thus failed to resolve this tension. Quantum mechanics was therefore bound to acquire those strange, and manifestly contingent, features which have haunted it to this day, features such as complementarity, the quantization of energy, the intrinsic nature of the probabilities, the superposition principle, the collapse of the wave function, and entanglement.
We, on the other hand, who are now in possession of that ontological understanding, should be able to derive these theoretical feature from the manner of being proper to an object of explanation. Consequently, these features would no longer appear as contingent but would rather become necessary as a direct manifestation of that ontology. First, as we shall show below, the need to capture the referential character of an object of explanation in the language proper to an object of experience explains why Bohr had to introduce the Complementary Principle. Second, the need to capture the syndotic character of an object of explanation in the language proper to an object of experience explains why Planck had to demand that the energy of the electromagnetic field emitted by a black body must have the spectral distribution of a collection of quanta, each of which possessed an energy which depended upon the frequency of the field; why the Copenhagen settlement had to demand that the location of an object of explanation be intrinsically probabilistic; and why Dirac had to demand that the state of such an object be a superposition of all the possible states into which the object could collapse upon observation. Third, the need to capture in the language proper to an object of experience the fact that an object of explanation always recalls the process of its manufacture explains why the states of two quantum objects must forever remain entangled with each other.