When Does Something Become Real?
Physics has an uncomfortable gap in its story.
At small scales, the world is quantum: things don’t have definite outcomes, only possibilities. A particle can take multiple paths. A proton can “tunnel” through a barrier instead of going over it. Nothing is settled.
At large scales, the world is classical: things happen. A reaction has a product. A measurement has a result. Facts exist.
But physics doesn’t really explain when or how that transition happens. At what point does a possibility stop being a possibility and become a fact?
A Missing Step in the Story
This work proposes that something important has been missing from our description of physical processes.
We usually think that once something happens—like a proton moving from one place to another—that’s the end of the story.
But what if it isn’t?
What if there is a gap between something happening and it becoming irreversibly real?
The Commitment Lag
Imagine a proton tunnelling through a barrier inside an enzyme.
The proton moves—that part is quantum mechanics, and it happens very quickly.
But immediately after, the surrounding environment hasn’t yet caught up. The nearby atoms haven’t fully rearranged. The system hasn’t yet “locked in” what happened.
For a brief window, the event is real—but not yet final.
We call this window the commitment lag:
the time between a physical transition and the formation of an irreversible fact.
During this time, the outcome is still vulnerable. Environmental noise can scramble it. The quantum signature of the event can fade before it ever becomes part of reality’s permanent record.
Enzymes as Reality Accelerators
Now here’s the surprising part.
Some enzymes—like ketosteroid isomerase (KSI)—appear to eliminate this gap almost entirely.
They don’t just make reactions faster by lowering energy barriers. They are structured so that the moment a proton tunnels, the surrounding molecular scaffold immediately stabilises the outcome.
There is almost no time between:
- the event happening
- and the universe “committing” to that event as a fact
In bulk water, the same reaction leaves a gap of around 1.6 picoseconds—long enough for environmental noise to significantly weaken the quantum effect.
In the enzyme, that gap collapses to around 0.17 picoseconds—nearly ten times shorter.
That difference turns out to matter enormously.
Why Quantum Effects Survive in Biology
For years, scientists have puzzled over why quantum tunnelling can persist in warm, noisy biological environments where it should disappear almost instantly.
This framework suggests a simple answer:
It’s not that enzymes protect quantum coherence.
It’s that they don’t give decoherence time to act.
By collapsing the commitment lag, enzymes convert quantum events into classical facts before the environment can erase them.
A New Way to Think About Reality
This idea reframes something much bigger than enzyme chemistry.
The quantum world and the classical world may not be two different realms at all.
They may be two different states of the same process:
- Proto-factual — events that have happened but are not yet fixed
- Committed — events that are irreversibly recorded and become facts
Every event in the universe may pass through this intermediate stage.
The present moment—the “now”—is not a clean boundary. It is a moving front where possibilities are continuously becoming facts.
The Bigger Picture
If this picture is right, then:
- The classical world emerges when systems cross a commitment threshold
- Quantum mechanics describes what happens before that threshold
- And the missing piece in physics has been this commitment process itself
Enzymes, it turns out, may be some of the best places to see this transition in action.
Not because they are exotic—but because they are precisely engineered to control when reality settles.