Why Facts Aren’t Free: A New Way to Think About Quantum Reality
Modern physics is extraordinarily good at predicting what might happen. Quantum mechanics can tell us the probability that a particle will be found here or there, that a qubit will read 0 or 1, or that a measurement will succeed with 99.9% confidence. What it does not tell us is something more basic and surprisingly overlooked: what does it cost to make one of those possibilities real?
Every time an experiment produces a definite outcome — a click in a detector, a bit stored in memory, a “yes” instead of a “maybe” — the universe has crossed a line. A possibility has become a fact. The Physical Admissibility Framework (PAF) starts from a simple but radical idea: facts are physical objects, and creating them is not free.
The Missing Accounting in Physics
Standard quantum mechanics is built on three pillars: states, dynamics, and probabilities. It tells us what states are allowed, how they evolve, and how likely different outcomes are. But it deliberately abstracts away the messy business of measurement: amplification, readout, resetting devices, stabilizing records. In the real world, those steps dominate the time, energy, and complexity of experiments — especially in quantum computing.
PAF adds what’s been missing: accounting. It treats distinguishability — the ability to reliably tell one outcome from another — as a finite physical resource. Turning uncertainty into certainty requires irreversible steps, and those steps consume time, energy, and entropy. In short: the universe keeps books, and every fact has a cost.
Why Measurement Is Hard (and Always Will Be)
This perspective explains several long-standing puzzles at once. Why does measurement slow experiments down even when quantum evolution is fast? Why does quantum error correction have such large overhead? Why does pushing measurements toward near-perfect certainty suddenly become so expensive?
PAF shows that while making an outcome almost certain is easy at the level of probabilities, forcing that certainty into a stable, physical record is not. Recording a fact becomes cheap only when it carries little information — but achieving that certainty through irreversible means requires increasingly extreme control. There is no free lunch: certainty may be cheap to write down, but it is expensive to enforce.
A New Lens on Quantum Foundations
Importantly, PAF doesn’t replace quantum mechanics or propose a new interpretation of reality. Instead, it acts like thermodynamics does for mechanics: a layer of constraints that tells us what is physically possible, impossible, or costly — regardless of interpretation. Whether you prefer many-worlds, hidden variables, or relational views, PAF asks the same question: how much does it cost to create a fact in your universe?
By grounding this question in real experiments — including published data from superconducting quantum devices — the framework connects deep foundational ideas to the everyday struggles of quantum engineers. It suggests that the difficulty of building large-scale quantum technologies is not just an engineering problem, but a reflection of fundamental limits on how facts come into being.
Why This Matters Beyond Quantum Physics
The implications reach further than quantum labs. If facts are costly, then time, irreversibility, and even the structure of spacetime itself may be tied to how information is committed and recorded at large scales. In this view, reality is not just evolving — it is constantly paying to become definite.
PAF offers a new way to think about why the universe looks classical when it does, why records persist, and why the arrow of time points the way it does. It reframes quantum mechanics not as a strange theory of probabilities, but as the minimal set of rules that allow facts to exist at all.