Aaron Vick
For over a century, quantum mechanics has treated collapse as a kind of narrative punctuation mark—something that just happens when a measurement is made. It’s abrupt, probabilistic, and outside the dynamics of Schrödinger’s equation.
But what if collapse wasn’t just an event?
What if it was a field—one you could detect before the wavefunction collapses?
That’s what I’ve been working on.
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For all the interpretations quantum mechanics has offered, collapse remains a mystery we sidestep rather than solve. In the Copenhagen view, it’s a black box—an event that “just happens” when we look. Decoherence theory gives us a statistical story: collapse appears as an emergent effect from entanglement with the environment, but never as a discrete, observable transition. And alternatives like Penrose’s objective reduction or GRW add speculative mechanics that remain untested or unfalsifiable.
What unites all of them is what they lack:
a measurable signal that tells us when and where collapse is building.
We know that decoherence correlates with entropy and loss of purity. But these are post-mortem metrics. They don’t predict collapse—they mark its aftermath. There’s no early warning. No structural precursor. No collapse radar.
And that’s the gap this model was designed to fill.
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My work introduces a testable, physically motivated field I call collapse tension—a measurable gradient derived from local entropy divergence.
Formally, it starts with:
This measures how much a local region deviates from the entropy average of its neighborhood.
Large \delta(S) means the system is under collapse tension.
When that tension propagates or interacts—collapse is likely.
This isn’t just an abstract diagnostic. It behaves like a field:
• Collapse fronts move across a system
• Interact with coherence barriers
• Interfere with each other (constructively or destructively)
• Leave memory structures after they pass
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In simulations of quantum walks, the collapse field reveals behaviors that standard models fail to capture. Most notably, it shows collapse pressure—quantified as entropy divergence—building up before decoherence manifests. These fields don’t just react; they predict. Walkers are redirected away from unstable regions not by probabilistic randomness, but by the spatial gradients in \delta(S). Even more strikingly, the flow of collapse encodes logic-like transitions—without invoking any measurement postulates or symbolic instruction sets.
If collapse behaves as a genuine propagating field tied to entropy curvature, the implications are substantial. We could begin designing quantum gates that incorporate collapse shielding as a structural property, shaping how information flows under pre-collapse stress. In superconducting qubits, this could serve as an early-warning mechanism—tracking subtle instabilities before coherence is lost. In error correction, \delta(S) may provide a new way to map the geometry of decoherence surfaces, offering spatial diagnostics rather than purely probabilistic fault models. And perhaps most radically, the interaction and interference of collapse fronts could form the basis of a new, non-symbolic model of computation—where logic emerges from spatial dynamics, not code.
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This isn’t a metaphysical rewrite of quantum foundations. It’s a field model layered on top of existing mechanics, offering:
• A new observable
• A new simulation layer
• A way to detect when collapse is more likely
• And how structure modulates that likelihood
Everything I’m describing is simulatable, testable, and in principle, measurable. You could probe this using weak measurement setups, entropy-tracking qubit logs, or programmable quantum walks.
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I’m not claiming to solve quantum gravity, or unify interpretations. But I am saying this:
If collapse tension is real—and its dynamics hold in real-world setups—we may finally have a way to move collapse out of the “unobservable” category, and into a system we can map, shape, and eventually control.
And that changes the game.
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What if quantum collapse wasn't just an event, but a field we could detect before it happens? I’m working on a mathematical framework that treats collapse as a measurable entropy gradient - potentially giving us a 'collapse radar' that could revolutionize quantum computing and error correction. https://blog.aaronvick.com/what-if-we-could-see-quantum-collapse-coming
bookmarked Love to see you tackle this one
ty fren
Discover the groundbreaking concept of collapse field dynamics, which introduces a measurable gradient called collapse tension, capable of predicting when collapse is likely to occur in quantum systems. Dive into this exploration by @aaronv.eth and rethink quantum past and future.