I wrote the linked articles and am finalizing a math-heavy technical book (when it goes live it will be under ISBN 978-1-291-55573-8) that critiques the doctrine of "value indefiniteness." Value indefiniteness claims systems lack definite properties until measurement causes "collapse," but it suffers from significant philosophical and mathematical flaws and is where all the supposed "weirdness" of quantum mechanics stems from.

If particles "collapse" at measurement, then they do something unique in their dynamics at measurement, rendering "measurement" a fundamental part of the theory. The physicist John Bell argued that treating measurement as fundamental requires a rigorous physical definition that textbooks fail to provide, leaving it ontologically incomplete as a theory of nature. The Soviet physicist Dmitry Blokhintsev showed that collapse introduces non-linear mathematics that produces different statistical predictions than standard quantum theory, making perfect mathematical reconciliation impossible.

Physicists call these issues the "measurement problem," but this term is misleading because "problem" implies it is something to be solved, but the issue is unsolvable. It represents a contradiction between two incompatible premises, meaning one must be wrong. In my view, value indefiniteness is the incorrect premise. My book demonstrates via polar decomposition that the statistical evolution of quantum information is already mathematically equivalent to a stochastic process where bits have definite values at every moment. This transformation reproduces Born rule statistics without proposing a new model, as it is literally mathematically equivalent. It is the same theory just represented under a simple mathematical transformation.

The ultimate difference between quantum and classical statistical dynamics lies in how distributions evolve. Classical statistics computes future states using only current distributions and interaction descriptions. Quantum statistics requires computing a function that additionally takes all past states back to the circuit's beginning as input. The Harvard physicist Jacob Barandes first identified this property as "non-Markovianity" in his 2025 paper "The Stochastic-Quantum Correspondence." Indeed, the majority of my book's pages is dedicated to demonstrating how quantum theory, as written, decomposes mathematically into something that is both purely statistical (no quantum state or phases; they all disappear, leaving you just statistics and operators) where the statistical laws are non-Markovian.

I then analyze major relevant papers including the PBR theorem, Bell’s theorem, the GHZ experiment, the Frauchiger-Renner paradox, and the double-slit experiment to show, mathematically, how this stochastic process explains them without presupposing value indefiniteness.

I've also built a simulator you can find below, where you can construct any arbitrary quantum circuit, up to 32 qubits, and it will simulate it as a stochastic process where the bits have definite values at each moment and evolve through stochastic hops. If you change from "single" mode to "shot" mode, it will run the program many times over, forming statistics of the final bits state, and the statistics always match the Born rule, not just at the end but at every time interval.

https://qansel.foleosoft.com/

If you can explain quantum mechanics so simply in this way, why do people treat it as so complicated?

My argument in the book is because this explanation does not actually give you a unique ontology, because when you do take into account the various previously mentioned papers (like Kochen-Specker and GHZ), you find that there are not inconsistencies but ambiguities in the ontology without answering 3 different questions, but the mathematical structure of quantum theory makes it physically impossible, by experiment, to discover the answers to those 3 questions.

Rather, it only constrains to a possible class of answers to those 3 questions. Any choice within that class produces a physically plausible ontology, but they are all empirically indistinguishable from each other.

Another user down below in the replies mentions Bohmian mechanics. Bohmian mechanics is a model within that class. Indeed, Bohm's derivation of Bohmian mechanics begins with a polar decomposition on the quantum state, the same kind of mathematical transformation that my book relies on. It then makes specific choices to the answers to those questions which are motivated by different arguments outside of what is directly empirically verifiable.

For example, one of the questions you have to answer is which basis should be privileged as the "ontic basis," even though all bases are mathematically symmetrical; this is referred to as quantum contextuality and is established by the Kochen-Specker theorem. Bohmian mechanics chooses the position basis, because "position" is the most defining characteristic of a particle, as they are geometric points in space, and a point is most fundamentally defined by its position. In principle, however, you could choose a different basis, like the momentum basis, and build an alternative ontological model which is mathematically equivalent in that it makes all the same empirical predictions, and is also ontologically consistent.

Bohmian mechanics is just one ontological model in a landscape of possible ontological models. It was, again, the physicist Dmitry Blokhintsev who pointed out that we can't actually empirically figure out the correct model due the "finiteness of interaction" as he called it (the inherent limitations in measurement precision given by Planck's constant) preventing us from actually probing answers to those questions.

Physicists don't like not knowing something. If it's knowable, they want to do an experiment to know it. If no experiment can reveal it, many, starting with Bohr and Heisenberg, started to insist that maybe we should stop believing there is anything to be known at all. If there simply is no underlying ontology, then there is nothing to be known to begin with, and thus we can be assured we know everything that there is to know.

This leads into the doctrine of "value indefiniteness": there simply is no ontology underlying the quantum state, and is the basis of the famous Copenhagen interpretation. The particle just has no position at all until you look, the bits in a quantum computer have no values at all until you look.

However, as I argue in the book, you cannot actually make this point of view compatible with realism, because it either is logically incoherent, or it is coherent, but provably deviates from the mathematical predictions of quantum theory. If we are realists who also believe quantum theory, as written, is correct, then "value indefiniteness" must be wrong.

We thus must just accept that the mathematics of the theory does simply leave the underlying ontology underdetermined, and to actually fully specify the ontology, we must either choose a convention (fully aware it is a convention, not necessarily the "correct" ontology but useful for a given experiment), or we must make arguments that go beyond what can be empirically demonstrated: not all answers to those 3 questions are equally reasonable, some are rather absurd and arbitrary, while some you can justify by other means.

There is simply no a priori reason to believe that the laws of physics are structured in such a way to allow humans in their tiny insignificant laboratories on this tiny pale blue dot to discover everything there is to know about the ontology of nature. It is quite easy to imagine the laws of physics being structured in such a way that simply disallows unambiguous answers to certain questions of ontology, and that is ultimately what I am to demonstrate in that book (and the article you cite is just a brief summary of the idea, which I tried to present without mathematics for the Laymen), that the structure of quantum theory fundamentally leaves 3 very important questions, needed to fully specify the ontology, not ruled out but underdetermined, so you can only restrict them to a class of possible answers rather than a singular answer.

You then must either go beyond the pure mathematics / empirical observations themselves to restrict those 3 questions further down to a specific answer, or you must just accept that we can't fully know the ontology and treat the ontology as something conventional. To be conventional does not mean to deny there is an underlying ontology or to resort to subjectivism; it is to choose an ontological model that is convenient given the context of your experimental setup, but with the acknowledgement that it is just a convenient choice, and thus you make no claims to certainty that it is the "true" ontological model, although it is a plausible one.

To deny the underlying ontology leads to nonsense and cannot be meaningfully reconciled with realism, at least under the basic requirements I put forward for any sensible realist ontology in the book, one of those requirements being the "no-solipsism" requirement, which is that your model should never produce multiple incompatible mental states for other observers. That is to say, the mental states of other observers must always be invariant.

The famous Frauchiger-Renner paradox, published in the journal Nature under the title "Quantum theory cannot consistently describe the use of itself," demonstrates quite unambiguously that every "value indefinite" interpretation fails this simple criterion. (Again, the mathematics of which I cover in my book in more detail, when the book is released.) If you read the paper, they also point out that Bohmian mechanics (a realist model) does not run into this problem, but requires answering a question which traditional quantum theory leaves underdetermined. My book ultimately generalizes that point.