What Persists in Neutrino Oscillation? Trajectory-States and the Ontological Surplus of Particle Language in QFT
Philip Rey
What Persists in Neutrino Oscillation? Trajectory-States and the Ontological Surplus of Particle Language in QFT Quantum field theory is routinely interpreted through the language of particles, even though its formalism is built from fields, amplitudes, excitations, and transition structures. This paper asks whether that vocabulary should be treated as literal ontology or as operational shorthand. It argues that, while particle language remains pragmatically indispensable, it may encode more ontological confidence than either QFT or detector practice strictly warrants. To sharpen this issue, the paper introduces Active Memory Engineering (AME) as an interpretive framework based on two operations: reconstruction and trajectory tracking through state change. On this view, what is physically continuous across a process is not primarily a microscopic object with fixed intrinsic identity, but a phase-evolving, reconstruction-dependent trajectory-state shaped by propagation history, coupling, and detection context. Neutrino oscillation provides the decisive case study. Rather than supporting naive object persistence, oscillation theory and experimental practice suggest a stronger picture of continuity through transformation. The paper concludes that particle language should be retained as an effective descriptive instrument, but not automatically elevated into a fundamental ontology.
•Mar 23, 2026•0 citations