Daryl Costello: Independent Researcher

Correspondence:Daryl.costello@outlook.com 

Rosendale, New York

August 2026

When we talk about “indeterminacy” in everyday life, it is rarely a spooky concept. Think of a word with multiple meanings; like “bat.” Standing alone, it is indeterminate. It holds pure potentiality. Is it a wooden club used in baseball, or a winged mammal flying through the night? The word itself doesn’t possess a fixed identity until it is placed into a sentence. The relational environment of the sentence is what collapses that indeterminacy into a stable, single meaning.

Yet, when we shift the conversation to physics, indeterminacy suddenly becomes the “quantum boogeyman.” It is treated as something almost supernatural, a mystical paradox where cats are simultaneously alive and dead, and particles magically teleport.

But what if the quantum isn’t a boogeyman at all? What if it is simply the ultimate, structural manifestation of that same everyday indeterminacy?

In our latest collective formal treatment, The Quantum as Wild-Card Relational Indeterminacy, we propose a framework that tames the quantum. Standard theory often treats the quantum as a self-contained entity possessing intrinsic, almost magical “degrees of freedom.” We argue the opposite. The quantum is not a complete thing; it is the irreducible residue of a singular identity that has lost its specific form. It is pure potentiality; a wild card.

Just like the isolated word “bat,” the quantum remains “spread out” and unresolved until it encounters an environment. It is the intersection of the reducible and the irreducible. The “degrees of freedom” do not belong to the quantum itself; they belong to the environment that provides the possible relational apertures.

Collapse is not a supernatural annihilation of parallel universes. It is simply the natural mechanism of generativity. It is the moment the pure, unresolved potentiality of the quantum enters into a relation with native determinacy, resolving into a stable identity. The relation itself does the taming.

By stripping away the mysticism, we can stop treating the quantum as a paradox to be feared, and start understanding it as the active, relational engine of reality’s generativity.