{"id":237758,"date":"2026-05-26T15:17:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T20:17:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/hume-rovelli-and-why-the-quantum-world-contains-no-objects"},"modified":"2026-05-26T15:17:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T20:17:15","slug":"hume-rovelli-and-why-the-quantum-world-contains-no-objects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/hume-rovelli-and-why-the-quantum-world-contains-no-objects","title":{"rendered":"Hume, Rovelli, and why the quantum world contains no objects"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/hume-rovelli-and-why-the-quantum-world-contains-no-objects.webp\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Quantum Mechanics is arguably one of the most successful theories in the history of science, for its predictions are confirmed by countless experiments, making it a cornerstone of contemporary physics. However, a century after its inception, the theory still challenges our classical worldview, offering a counterintuitive description of nature at microscopic scales. Contrary to classical mechanics, where objects are individually distinguishable and possess well-defined attributes at all times, QM speaks about indistinguishable systems with indeterminate properties, superposed states, and non-local interactions. Unsurprisingly, then, questions concerning its ontology, i.e., what fundamentally exists, are still vividly discussed to this day.<\/p>\n<p>Despite its empirical success, however, physicists and philosophers alike enquire whether QM should be considered a true description of the natural world, because this theory is affected by conceptual conundrums and formal difficulties (e.g., <a href=\"https:\/\/link.springer.com\/article\/10.1007\/BF00763473\" target=\"\u201c_blank\u201d\">the measurement problem<\/a>). To address such issues, new quantum interpretations emerged from the 1950s. Among the many existing alternatives, here we consider a widely discussed framework that turns thirty this year, Carlo Rovelli\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/qm-relational\/\" target=\"\u201c_blank\u201d\">Relational Quantum Mechanics<\/a> (RQM).<\/p>\n<p>RQM is motivated by Rovelli\u2019s work in loop quantum gravity, where spacetime is not a substance existing <em>per se<\/em>, but rather it emerges from a dynamic network of relations, providing a <a href=\"https:\/\/share.google\/UmYKIhZEvWfAbfv44\/articles\/consciousness-is-irrelevant-to-quantum-mechanics-auid-2187\" target=\"\u201c_blank\u201d\"><em>relational<\/em> perspective<\/a> of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Quantum Mechanics is arguably one of the most successful theories in the history of science, for its predictions are confirmed by countless experiments, making it a cornerstone of contemporary physics. However, a century after its inception, the theory still challenges our classical worldview, offering a counterintuitive description of nature at microscopic scales. Contrary to classical [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237758\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}