Understand, step by step
One idea.
Eight steps to follow it.
A glass, a fall, consequences: let us follow the same story to understand the present, possible futures and how they change. Time, gravity and quantum physics come next.
The present is what becomes actual.
Let us return to the glass at the edge of the table. It is there, now. It may fall, be caught or stay in place: these outcomes are not yet facts.
The glass falls and breaks. A possibility has become a fact: this is actualization. The actualization threshold refers to this transition, not a stage before the event becomes real.
How does this fit with relativity?
Facts occur locally, within relativistic causality. The model does not posit a single “now” synchronized throughout the cosmos.
An open future is not an empty future.
Let us go back to just before the fall. The glass may be caught or hit the floor. A rug, a nearby hand, the position of the glass: all of these change the possible outcomes and their probabilities.
In the model, what we call “the future” is this set of possibilities carried by the present. This is the field of potentiality, or field of possibilities. It is not a script that has already been written.
The model proposes that some continuations are not yet determined—not merely unknown to us. This is an assumption about reality, not simply a way of saying that we do not know the future.
What does the symbol π represent in the model?
The symbol π summarizes the degree of constraint on possibilities. It gives neither the identity of the outcomes nor the probability of each one. It therefore does not replace a probability distribution.
What happens changes the possibilities that follow.
The sound of the breaking glass reaches someone in the next room. They come to look, avoid the pieces and pick them up. The consequences of the event spread and transform what can happen next.
This feedback moves forward in time. It uses present traces; it does not take the system back into a past that no longer exists.
Feedback reshapes the field of possibilities at every degree of determination: from still-blurred futures to events close to actualization. It acts as consequences spread, not instantaneously everywhere.
The future is open, but it is never without a history.
Sound does not arrive everywhere at once
The nearby person already hears the glass breaking. Farther away, the other has not heard it yet. Meanwhile, each continues to act.
One event, consequences that reach each person progressively.
Time is this movement continuing.
Possibilities become facts. Their consequences spread and transform the possibilities that follow. Other events actualize, and so on.
In probabilistic presentism, this ongoing succession constitutes the world's becoming. At our scale, this ceaseless sequence appears to us as a continuous flow: time.
Intertwining cycles
New events actualize while the consequences of earlier ones continue to spread.
Becoming does not wait for a cycle to end: events and their effects intertwine.
The glass breaks, the sound spreads, a person hears it and moves. Each event changes what follows. Everywhere, countless cycles intertwine, without a universal clock making the entire Universe advance in step.
A clock measures a duration. The model seeks to relate this duration to local becoming, without conflating them. This connection still needs to be tested against measurements.
Proper time and ontological time: what is the distinction?
The duration measured by a clock along its path is proper time. “Ontological time” refers to the proposed accumulation of local becoming.
A quantity denoted Θ, the density of becoming, is intended to relate this accumulation to proper duration. It is neither a subjective impression nor a quantity already measured: its independent measurement remains to be defined.
The past happened. Its traces are here.
The glass has broken. That event is no longer happening, but the pieces are still on the floor. The sound may have been heard, someone remembers it, someone has begun cleaning up.
In probabilistic presentism, the past no longer exists as a moment we could return to. It acts through what it has changed in the present.
Even once the pieces have been picked up, the situation is not the same as before: the glass is missing, a memory remains, the actions that follow may be different.
The past happened. Its traces exist now. They help shape possible futures.
What happened
The glass broke.
What remains now
Pieces, a memory, a missing glass.
What this changes next
Avoiding the shards, cleaning up, choosing another glass.
Why does the glass remain a glass?
The glass can stay on the table for an hour. If reality is a continuous becoming, why does its shape not change at every moment?
Change does not mean turning everything upside down. Transformations can preserve an organization: the glass remains recognizable, its parts remain connected, its shape is maintained.
Becoming continues. Organization is maintained.
The preprint associates stable matter with strongly constrained local futures. In other words, possibilities remain channeled: not all transformations are equally accessible.
Stability is not the absence of becoming. It is an organization that persists through it.
This image helps explain the model's proposal. It does not replace the physical description of the bonds that make the glass solid.
Why does the glass fall?
Why does the glass fall to the ground? Because the Earth exerts gravitational attraction. But how does probabilistic presentism propose to understand this attraction?
In the model, matter changes the field of possibilities around it. Near a mass such as the Earth, accessible futures are organized differently than they are farther away. This variation from place to place is related to gravitational acceleration.
Matter sculpts the future.
In the model, possible futures narrow near a mass such as the Earth: they are more constrained there.
Possibilities form a landscape.
This constraint varies from place to place. Imagine a slope: it is this variation, called a gradient, that the model relates to gravity.
The fall reflects this landscape.
The successive positions of the glass spread apart as it accelerates towards the ground. The model relates this acceleration to the landscape of possibilities, without the glass having to choose its direction.
In probabilistic presentism, the Earth does not only change the motion of the glass: it changes the organization of possible futures around it. Gravity is the proposed expression of this organization in the motion of bodies.
How does this relate to general relativity?
The preprint retains the relativistic geometric framework and proposes to connect it to the actualization field. In a static, weak-field limit, it relates gravitational potential to this field and acceleration to its spatial variation.
This correspondence is a proposal of the model. By itself, it is neither experimental validation of this interpretation nor a demonstration covering all gravitational regimes.
The quantum world: one point at a time, why bands?
The double-slit experiment, from the beginning
Imagine a small device that sends particles, such as electrons, one at a time. In front of it is a barrier with two very narrow openings: the “two slits.” Behind it, a detector screen marks where each particle arrives.
With ordinary small balls, we would not expect a whole series of distinct bands on the screen. Yet, with this quantum setup properly prepared, the points eventually form pronounced bands separated by almost empty regions—even when particles are sent one at a time.
It is this difference that the experiment makes visible. Let us first look at what happens, then at the interpretation proposed by probabilistic presentism.
Possibilities that reinforce or cancel each other.
Think of two waves meeting: depending on how they overlap, they can reinforce or cancel each other. In the experiment, the possibilities of arrival exhibit this kind of combination: some regions become more likely, others less likely. This is called interference.
A single impact appears.
For a detection, the screen records a point at a specific location. In the presentist interpretation, this localized result is the actualized fact. A person does not need to watch the screen for it to be recorded.
Many impacts reveal the bands.
As the experiment is repeated, some regions receive more impacts than others. Together they reveal an interference pattern, even though each result was recorded separately.
Impacts are localized facts. Their distribution reveals the structure of possibilities.
The preprint proposes reading the “wave” aspect as the structure of possibilities before actualization, and the “particle” aspect as the recorded fact. This does not mean replacing quantum calculations with the image of an ordinary wave.
The drawing therefore does not say: “the particle must have followed a hidden path.” It distinguishes what can happen from what is actually recorded.
Interference, entanglement and a single outcome: the details
In the double-slit experiment, impacts are recorded one by one on a screen. Their accumulation can form interference fringes.
The presentist interpretation distinguishes the structure of possibilities before detection from the fact recorded afterwards. It adopts quantum probabilities without claiming to replace their calculation with the indicator π alone.
Delayed choice does not require rewriting the past. Entanglement does not allow a controlled message to be sent faster than light. These constraints are preserved in the interpretation.
The preprint distinguishes decoherence, which spreads information into the environment, from actualization, described as a discrete, nonlinear process. It proposes this mechanism while identifying the development of a complete quantum formalism as work still to be pursued.