Observation as an Indexical Fiber over Spacetime: A Kinematic Representation and the Dynamics It Permits
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: I present a kinematic representation of quantum definiteness: an account of what a definite outcome is, rather than of the process by which one comes about. The central claim is that whether an outcome has obtained is indexical content about a physical description, not a degree of freedom within it, a fact of the same kind as which point is here or which moment is now. To make this precise, I attach to a four-dimensional causal spacetime M₄ a fiber bundle with structure group ℤ/2 and two-element fiber Ω = {ω₀, ω₁}. The fiber is deliberately bare, carrying no measure, metric, order, or dynamics. Definiteness is simply the value this index takes, relative to a local observable algebra, at a region of spacetime. The representation introduces no new empirical content. It reproduces standard quantum statistics, predicts nothing that would distinguish it from standard quantum theory, and offers instead one coherent packaging of structure the theory already carries, under a discipline that keeps the object from acquiring anything it has not declared. Within that discipline I prove what the index forecloses. No deterministic law diagonal in the pointer basis can act on the index and reproduce Born statistics; it gives winner-take-all selection instead (Theorem 1). Every swap-invariant fact about the bare fiber reduces to a single holonomy class in H¹(M₄; ℤ/2), so the index cannot carry dynamical structure covertly (Theorem 2). The Born measure is not derived but inherited: Gleason's theorem fixes it on the projection lattice in dimension three and above, and the discrete index is provably too coarse to carry it. The positive work is to separate three obstructions to a global description of definiteness that are routinely conflated. A global choice of the manifest value exists exactly when a holonomy class A vanishes, in close analogy with the orientability of a double cover and its first Stiefel–Whitney class (Proposition 2). Distinct from A is C, the failure of a common section across incompatible measurement contexts meeting at one region; distinct again is B, Kochen–Specker contextuality on the projection lattice. I show that A and C are different objects (Proposition 4), and that C and B differ as well (Proposition 4′), leaving open only how C and B relate where both can occur. Throughout, I am explicit about which mathematics is inherited, which is elementary once isolated, and which is my own framing, and about what a dynamics inhabiting this kinematics would and would not be permitted to add. This version (v3) adds the result distinguishing the common-section obstruction from contextuality, on a single-qubit witness, and narrows the one open question accordingly. It settles the typology of the framework, marking which commitments are constitutive of the indexical reading and which are austerity choices relaxable at a stated cost, and records that the austerity's inviolability is secured by the theorems rather than merely stipulated. It adds a rigor clause to the first foreclosure result and a reference to the spontaneous-collapse bounds now under laboratory test. Submitted for technical scrutiny, not belief.
Authors: Reid, Aron, Anthropic, Claude
Language: English
Subfield: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7203548261