The wave is what exists. The particle is what happens.
A realist account of quantum events
composite field ⟶ bath carries a record ⟶ anchored mark
A quantum system is one composite field whose modes interfere. The electron is never a particle: it is a stable wave-mode structure of that field, from start to finish. When the field meets a detector, the detector’s bath of photons and vibrating atoms carries a record that tells the alternatives apart, say the two lobes of the wave behind two slits, while the field itself passes through both. When nothing the system will go on to interact with can recover that record, it is released, and one outcome becomes an anchored event in the one history we live in. No observer is needed. The field evolves without interruption; the mark is what happens.
The main accounts keep a particle somewhere, at the detector or on a hidden path, or they keep every outcome, each in a world of its own. ACT does neither.
Start here
Read this first
The founding idea of ACT, in four sentences. Each carries one of the three principles, quoted at its head; every page of this site defends one of these sentences.
Principle II
The wave/field’s superposition can be described as Fourier modes. That is what superposition and quantum states are. Fourier modes for a free field; in general, the decomposition the dynamics select.
A quantum system is one real, composite wave — a field with genuine internal structure, the way a sound wave genuinely contains its harmonics. Superposition is the composition of that one wave. And which decomposition of the wave matters physically is not a human choice — the dynamics decide: for a free field, its Fourier-like modes; for a field meeting an apparatus, the alternatives the interaction can hold stable.
Defended in The field and its modes · The Lagrangian
Principle I
The quantum wave/field is atemporal until it is subjected to a quantum Brownian bath.
Before anchoring, the wave is not yet in time: a pre-anchored field configuration has structure but no temporal causal history. Mass gives the field a clock; anchoring gives the clock its readings. Entering time happens at anchoring, which is why a massless photon’s detection still creates a temporal fact.
Defended in Not yet in time · Mass and time · The Legendre point
Principle III
The quantum Brownian bath explains the detector/observer effect.
Measurement is a detector anchoring a mode of the field. Through ordinary quantum Brownian motion — the photons, phonons, and detector modes already present in the world — the apparatus couples to the wave, the coupled dynamics stabilizes one set of alternatives, and one mark enters the actual record. Nothing collapses: the wave’s structure persists, and the accumulating record history — not the wave alone — is the definite, temporal, causal world.
Defended in Entering causal time · The event law
Principle III, continued
Because anchoring is done by real couplings, the rate depends on the detector’s architecture — its size, its couplings, its environment. The picture was anchored to experiment before it was formalized.
Defended in Evidence: four thought experiments · The rate is physical
composite quantum field ⟶ quantum Brownian interaction with a detector ⟶ stable record formation ⟶ anchoring ⟶ one causal history
Quantum mechanics describes the real structure of possibility. Anchoring describes the production of fact.
Beyond standard quantum mechanics, ACT adds one commitment: one history of marks is actual. That no event leaves two marks is a theorem for the systems the companion papers treat, and a further commitment beyond them. Everything else is standard physics, arranged.
