Physics versus Semantics: A Puzzling Case of the Missing Quantum Theory

Claudio Garola

Ghenadie N. Mardari

Modern theoretical physics is built around two myths. The first one is that quantum observables are inseparable from the act of measurement. In some cases, this “observer effect” is supposed to be so strong that some qualities are mutually exclusive. Though, what is the difference between quantum contextuality and classical contextuality? This is where the second myth comes in. Objectively incompatible properties are treated as if they do not exist in classical physics. Instead, only two types of observables are considered: the ones that can occur at the same time as part of a single system, and the ones that are produced by measurement artifacts. As a result, we have a gap between two incomplete theories: a “quantum” theory without objective processes and a “classical” theory without mutually exclusive events. Together, they create the false impression that quantum entanglement is non-local. This is illustrated below with a clockwork mechanism for predetermined sequential properties. The system produces super-quantum Bell violations, as well as the features of quantum monogamy, in ideal experiments without loopholes. A separate illustration, with a classical fluid flow-splitter, is used to explain quantum-like Bell violations with independent and random measurement settings at remote stations. Objective contextuality is the missing piece of the quantum puzzle.

Claudio Garola

Forrest Bishop

Newcomb's Paradox in decision theory and the quantum measurement problem in physics have been treated as unrelated for sixty years. They share an anatomy. In each, two outcomes are correlated, the standard framing omits the shared cause that produced them, and the omission is what manufactures the paradox. Restoring the cause dissolves it. The shared cause is a physical thing, not a mental one, which is why the same move reaches both problems. In Newcomb's case it is the history of contact that shaped both the Predictor's accuracy and the Player's disposition; the accuracy stipulated in the puzzle is a calibration record the decision-theory literature mistook for a free parameter. In the quantum case it is the preparation that stamped both particles. Two correlated records, one upstream source, every causal arrow running forward in time. The tools come from Miximin Decision Theory, developed in The Miximin Order. The standard quantum formalism is left untouched: what dissolves is the appearance of backward causation and spooky action, not the arithmetic. Bell's theorem stands, and the assumption it costs is identified. The quantum probabilities are left open as a real question, separated from the paradoxes they have been filed with. William Newcomb, who invented the puzzle, never published it.

Hans Herlof Grelland

Jonathon Sendall

This paper argues that several canonical puzzles in quantum mechanics, including spin measurement, the double slit, entanglement correlations, and Wigner's friend, share a common origin in a semantic error and the illicit promotion of interaction conditional outcomes to intrinsic properties. I introduce four principles that license only configuration relative predication, grounding outcomes in physical measurement geometry while preserving objectivity. Applying these principles uniformly dissolves each puzzle without new physics or ad hoc interpretive machinery. Bell's theorem and the Kochen-Specker theorem are reframed not as dynamical mysteries but as constraints on permissible explanatory structure, evidence that intrinsic-outcome semantics is incompatible with empirical reality. The result is a relational objectivity that avoids both naive property realism and observer subjectivism.