Quantum Leaps, WRXs, and the Elegance of Discontinuity
by Brent Antonson (Zhivago)
Planksip | Philosophy. Science. Narrative.
Quantum Instantaneity
I recently captured three views of my 2011 Subaru WRX — my dream car, now my favorite metaphor for physics.
(A) — A short video: me walking around the car.
(B) — A still photo of the front.
(C) — A still photo of the rear.
The video (A) feels continuous — a steady flow of moments, each birthing the next. It mirrors how we imagine time: a smooth river carrying cause and effect downstream.
The photos (B) and (C), by contrast, are quantum snapshots. Two discrete realities, separated by everything unobserved.
When you leap from (B) to (C), your mind performs a quantum jump. You skip all the dandelions, side panels, and spilled coffee in between. Like an electron transitioning orbitals, you perceive the before and after — but never the during.
That gap is the miracle.
And the problem.
Frames, Illusions, and the Machinery of Belief
Human vision stitches reality from roughly 30 frames per second. Below that, movement stutters; above that, we’re tricked into continuity. Early cinema exploited this — Muybridge’s galloping horse proved that a running horse lifts all four hooves mid-air. We discovered motion by breaking it.
Reversing the frames flips cause and effect. A shattering glass becomes a perfect restoration. Einstein noticed a similar reversibility in relativity: time can run both ways inside equations. But quantum mechanics refuses to play that game. It’s discontinuous — a mosaic pretending to be a mural.
An electron doesn’t orbit like a planet. It exists as a probability cloud. Observation collapses it into a point, and until that collapse, its “where” is more like “maybe.”
Einstein hated this. “I cannot believe the moon is not there when I am not looking,” he said.
But maybe the moon — and everything else — only exists when observed.
We’ve built our entire civilization on the assumption that continuity is real. But nature, it seems, prefers editing.
Quantum Gravity and the Death of Mathematics
Physicists have spent a century trying to reconcile Einstein’s smooth spacetime with quantum mechanics’ jittery discontinuity. The likely bridge is quantum gravity, a theory still unborn.
At its core would be the graviton, the hypothetical quantum particle of gravity. Detecting it would complete physics’ Holy Trinity: electromagnetism, nuclear forces, and gravity unified.
Yet the math falters at the extremes — black holes, the Big Bang — where equations implode into infinities. These are the places where mathematics goes to die.
Even the Large Hadron Collider, humanity’s grandest ring of reason, is approaching its limits. A proposed 100-km collider might not operate before 2060. By then, nature may have moved on.
Quantum Tunneling and the Limits of Logic
Sometimes particles cheat.
When a barrier is too high to climb, a particle tunnels through it — borrowing energy from the vacuum, repaying it instantly. This is allowed because at the Planck scale — the smallest conceivable distance or time — energy, space, and causality blur.
The quantum foam churns with creation and annihilation events so rapid that ordinary arithmetic gives up.
At that level, logic itself tunnels.
Toward an Elegant Equation
Return to the WRX.
Video (A) represents continuity, relativity, and the arrow of time.
Still frames (B, C) represent discontinuity, entanglement, and quantum leaps.
Somewhere between them lies elegance — the synthesis of flow and fracture.
If you could write that synthesis, it might read:
B + C ≈ A²
A joke equation, sure — but not meaningless.
The leap from one frame to another is squared in experience: we remember beginnings and endings, rarely middles.
If mathematics is the language of God, its grammar is compression — clarity that survives translation.
Elegance in Numbers
Pi (π ≈ 3.14159) and Phi (ϕ ≈ 1.61803) are ugly decimals but perfect ideas. Together, they sketch the spiral: galaxies, hurricanes, shells, and WRX turbochargers all obey the same ratio. The Fibonacci sequence (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…) is nature’s metronome. Disturb it even slightly, and the beauty collapses.
In 2013, a mathematician named Cleo solved a complex integral with this deceptively lyrical result:
I = 4π arccot √ϕ
A formula so simple it feels accidental — like poetry written by physics itself.
Einstein would have smiled. He once said, “God is subtle, but not malicious.”
Elegance is the signature of truth.
The Elegance of Discontinuity
Maybe the universe doesn’t flow at all.
Maybe it flickers — a billion stills per second, rendered by consciousness like frames in a cosmic projector.
Continuity is the illusion of persistence.
Discontinuity is the fact of being.
Every photon that strikes our retina, every heartbeat, every WRX engine firing in sync — it’s all happening in discrete packets of existence, each quantum jumping into the next.
The elegance is not in the smoothness, but in the gaps that still make sense.
Because sometimes, all the music happens at once.