The Ballerina and the Photon

How Our Language Betrays the Fluid Heart of Quantum Mechanics

Caption: An AI generated image of a ballerina photographed, suspended in mid-pirouette, courtsey of Nano Banana.

We are prisoners of our grammar. When we peer into the quantum realm, we are armed with a language built for a world of medium-sized objects—a world of tables, rocks, and ballerinas. We instinctively parse reality into nouns, into things. It is this very instinct, this 'substance ontology', inherited from our understanding of classical mechanics, that casts a long, distorting shadow over our interpretation of quantum mechanics, forcing us to describe a dynamic, relational process in the static language of classical physics.

Consider the ballerina.

A photograph captures her in a breathtaking leap, suspended in mid-air. We can point to the image and say, 'There she is'. But this snapshot, for all its beauty, is a lie of omission. It has frozen a single moment, stripping away the essential truth: the ballet is not a collection of poses, but the fluid, continuous process of movement between them. The performance is the dance itself, a reality that cannot be encapsulated by any single frame.

Now, consider the photon.

We call it a 'particle', a word that conjures the image of a minuscule bullet or a celestial billiard ball. When it strikes a detector, leaving a single, localized dot, we point to that mark and say, 'There it is'. This is our quantum snapshot. We then spend our careers in a state of conceptual whiplash, trying to reconcile this particle-like behavior with its wave-like nature, evidenced in interference patterns. We call this the 'wave-particle duality', a profound mystery. But what if the mystery is, in part, an artifact of our language? What if we are trying to describe the entire ballet using the vocabulary of frozen poses?

The Tyranny of the Noun

Our language is steeped in substance ontology—the philosophical position that the fundamental constituents of reality are independent, self-sustaining things or substances that bear properties. A rock is hard, brown, and heavy. The properties belong to the substance. This framework is so ingrained that we apply it unthinkingly to the quantum world. We say 'the photon has a wavelength', or 'the electron is in a superposition', as if it were a state of being for a tiny thing.

But quantum mechanics, in its mathematical formalism, suggests something far more fluid. The wavefunction does not describe a thing with a definite location; it describes a landscape of potentialities, a set of propensities for future interactions. It is a recipe for process. The evolution of this wavefunction via the Schrödinger equation is a smooth dance. The 'collapse' upon measurement is not a property change of a substance, but a radical, discontinuous event—a transition, a moment in the process where potential becomes actual.

The very term 'particle' is a relic, a comforting lie we tell ourselves to make the bizarre intelligible. We are like the ancient astronomers clinging to perfect circular orbits, adding epicycle upon epicycle to save the phenomena, rather than accepting the elegant truth of elliptical motion. Our 'epicycle' is the desperate attempt to force the process of quantum mechanics into the neat categories of classical mechanics.

Quantum Field Theory: The Dance Floor

The move to Quantum Field Theory (QFT) only deepens this realization. In QFT, the primary reality is not the particle but the field. An electron is not a tiny point-particle orbiting a nucleus. Instead, there is an all-pervasive electron field throughout spacetime. What we call an 'electron' is merely a localized excitation of that field—a resonant vibration, a knot of energy.

The analogy becomes clearer: the quantum field is the dance company and the stage itself. The photon, the electron, the quark—these are the specific dances, the dynamic patterns and excitations within the field. To ask: 'what is the photon?' is to miss the point. The photon is in the dancing—a verb we miscategorize as a noun.

Towards a Process Ontology

To truly interpret quantum mechanics may require a Copernican shift in our philosophical grounding: from a substance ontology to a process ontology. In this view, processes, events, and becoming are more fundamental than things, substances, and being.

• Relations are Primary: Properties are not inherent but are abstractions defined through interactions (measurements).
• Dynamics are Fundamental: The 'thing' is secondary to the behavior and the set of possible events in which it can participate.

The ballerina is not a substance that occasionally dances; her existence is constituted by the dancing. Similarly, the photon is not a thing that sometimes behaves like a wave; its 'thing-ness' is its wave-like, interactive, and relational existence.

Letting go of the substance worldview is extraordinarily difficult. It requires us to unlearn millennia of ingrained thought. But the reward is a potential liberation from quantum paradoxes that are, at their heart, artifacts of a misplaced classical realism. The snapshot is real—the dot on the detector is undeniable—but it is not the whole truth. The truth is the magnificent, counterintuitive and ongoing performance. To understand the quantum world, we must finally stop collecting snapshots and learn to see the dance.^[1]

The Gospel of Being

by John Mackay

A rigorous yet readable exploration of how existence functions—and how that relates to you.

Discover the book