I AM MY HISTORY

Introduction:

*Everything you know is by analogy.
*Analogy: a comparison of two otherwise unlike things based on resemblance of a particular aspect. Mathematics is an analogy for reality. The more accurately a mathematical analogy predicts reality, the easier it becomes to mistake the analogy for reality itself. That is a genuine danger in interpreting quantum mechanics.
*I am my history: Neither an analogy nor a metaphor, but a literal statement of identity. I am “My History + Stimulus → Response → New History . . .ad infinitum”

*Richard Feynman (famous physicist) : “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. Electrons, when they were first discovered, behaved exactly like particles or bullets, very simply. Further research showed, from electron diffraction experiments for example, that they behaved like waves. As time went on there was a growing confusion about how these things really behaved —- waves or particles, particles or waves? Everything looked like both.

“This growing confusion was resolved in 1925 or 1926 with the advent of the correct equations for quantum mechanics. Now we know how the electrons and light behave. But what can I call it? If I say they behave like particles I give the wrong impression; also if I say they behave like waves. They behave in their own inimitable way, which technically could be called a quantum mechanical way. They behave in a way that is like nothing that you have seen before.

“Your experience with things that you have seen before is incomplete. The behavior of things on a very tiny scale is simply different. An atom does not behave like a weight hanging on a spring and oscillating. Nor does it behave like a miniature representation of the solar system with little planets going around in orbits. Nor does it appear to be somewhat like a cloud or fog of some sort surrounding the nucleus. It behaves like nothing you have seen before.”

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I AM MY HISTORY

Are physicists confusing mathematics with reality?

Imagine that you have a photograph of yourself taken yesterday. Is that photograph you? Obviously not. It is a representation of you at one particular moment. It tells us something about your appearance, but almost nothing about the millions of events that made you who you are.

Now imagine that a physicist has a mathematical description of an electron. Is that mathematical description the electron itsef? That question lies at the heart of a controversy that has troubled physicists for nearly a century.

Quantum mechanics (QM) is the branch of physics that describes the behavior of extremely small things, such as electrons and atoms. Its mathematics works  quite well predicting experimental results . But there is a problem.

Does the fact that mathematics  accurately predicts what something will do mean that the mathematics tells us what that thing actually is? Consider a map. An excellent map may predict exactly where a road leads. But nobody would confuse the map with the road.

Mathematics, when used to describe physical reality, is a type of analogy. It represents selected relationships between things. It isn’t the things themselves. Yet some interpretations of quantum mechanics seem to make that leap.

A famous thought experiment involves a cat in a closed box. According to one familiar interpretation of quantum mechanics, until someone opens the box, the cat is described as being both alive and dead. Not merely that we don’t know whether the cat is alive or dead. The mathematics indicates a combination of both possibilities.

But must we believe that the cat actually occupies both conditions? Or have we mistaken a mathematical description for physical reality?

A physicist named Jacob Barandes has proposed a different way of looking at quantum mechanics. His proposal raises a fascinating possibility: Perhaps what something does depends on more of its history than our usual mathematical descriptions acknowledge.

That brings me to this simple statement: I AM MY HISTORY.

Part One: The Quantum World May Not Be as Strange as We Think

Schrödinger’s cat

In 1935, physicist Erwin Schrödinger imagined placing a cat inside a sealed box with a device that could release poison, depending on whether a particular radioactive atom decayed.

Quantum mechanics describes radioactive decay in terms of probabilities. Before measurement, the atom’s mathematical description includes both the possibility that it has decayed and the possibility that it has not. If we apply that description to the entire apparatus, we arrive at the famous cat that appears to be both alive and dead.

Schrödinger was illustrating how peculiar quantum theory becomes when its mathematics is applied to ordinary objects. The question is whether the mathematical combination of possibilities represents something physically real. Perhaps the cat is simply alive or dead, and the mathematics is a way of calculating what we are likely to discover.

But can’t we explain the remarkable predictions of quantum mechanics without treating mathematical superpositions as literal physical conditions.

A physicist proposes another explanation

In November 2026, New Scientist published an article titled “Is Schrödinger’s cat both dead and alive? No, it’s just haunted by its past.” The article discussed work by Jacob Barandes, a physicist and philosopher at Harvard University.

Barandes has developed a mathematical approach suggesting that quantum systems can be understood as physical processes with definite configurations, changing over time according to probabilistic laws.

That sounds rather ordinary. A ball has a position. It moves. Something affects its motion. But quantum objects behave in ways that ordinary balls don’t. They produce interference patterns, become entangled, and exhibit correlations that conventional classical models cannot reproduce.

Barandes argues that we may understand these effects without treating “the wave function”—the mathematical object used to describe quantum possibilities—as a fundamental physical thing. His approach uses what physicists call indivisible stochastic processes.

Don’t let that phrase frighten you. Stochastic means involving probability. Indivisible, in this context, refers to a particular mathematical property: the probabilities governing a process cannot always be broken into successive, independent steps in the familiar way.

The important idea is that the system’s evolution may involve relationships across time that a simple present-to-future description misses.

What happened yesterday matters tomorrow

Suppose you see a man limping. You could describe his present condition: his position, walking speed, and the angle of his leg. But suppose he injured his knee yesterday. That history helps explain his present behavior and may help predict what he will do tomorrow.

Of course, an adequately detailed physical examination of his knee might reveal the injury’s consequences without anyone telling you what happened yesterday. That raises an interesting fact.

The present physical state doesn’t contain all the information needed to predict the future. The system’s history can provide additional information, if we know how to extract and evaluate it.

Many familiar models assume that a sufficiently complete present description is enough. Physicists call that assumption the Markov property. I suggest that ignoring history is a fundamental error of modern physics. The tacit assumption that history doesn’t matter, so long as one knows the present — the failure to consider “why?” — is an unwarranted assumption.

Barandes’s formulation uses processes that do not obey that property in the usual way. In other words, a simple snapshot may not be enough to describe how the process unfolds.

There is a crucial qualification: Barandes is not claiming that ordinary physics has forgotten that objects have pasts. His proposal concerns the mathematical structure of probability and how quantum behavior can arise from it. Nevertheless, the emphasis on time relationships is important.

True, the evaluation of an entity’s complete history becomes exceedingly arduous, perhaps impossible by today’s standards, but the difficulty of examination doesn’t prove that examination is unnecessary.

The history of a criminal 

When an otherwise ordinary-looking man suddenly commits a violent act, we don’t merely observe his present appearance and conclude, “He seemed normal. There was no reason for his actions.”

Instead, we investigate his history—his relationships, upbringing, experiences, and even stories passed down through generations. Somewhere among the countless stimuli and responses that shaped him may lie an explanation for his behavior. Some influences may have occurred decades earlier, their consequences accumulating through subsequent experiences.

We may never discover all those influences. Some may remain hidden simply because nobody thought to look for them or recognized their significance.

But our inability to discover a cause does not establish that no cause exists.

The man who committed the act is not separate from the man who experienced that history.

His present behavior emerged from the continuing interaction between his accumulated history and the circumstances he encountered.

He is the entirety of his history. 

A history can be causally important even when we cannot observe or reconstruct it. We must consider whether the same principle might apply to electrons, atoms, and all other physical entities.

Nothing happens for no reason. Everything happens because of cause —> effect. What seems random, i.e. happening with no predictable or observable cause, is caused by some as yet undiscovered, unweighted cause.

I am my history.

What about entanglement?

Quantum entanglement is the phenomenon in which the quantum state of each particle in a group remain dependent on the state of the others, even when the particles are separated by a large distance. Imagine two particles that interact and then travel far apart. Measurements performed on them can produce correlations stronger than those expected by ordinary classical explanations.

Einstein was deeply troubled by this phenomenon. But the correlations seemed to allow people to send usable messages faster than light, which according to our knowledge of physics, is impossible.

Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance,” and it frequently is described as “weird.” But consider this: In reality, nothing is weird.

“Weird” is our description of something that conflicts with our expectations or understanding. And when the mathematics predicts a phenomenon accurately, but our interpretation of that mathematics makes the phenomenon seem impossible or bizarre, we must question our interpretation rather than assume that reality itself is bizarre.

Perhaps the mathematics is correct, but our understanding of what it represents is incomplete or mistaken. The problem may not be with the universe. It may be with the story we tell ourselves about the universe. 

Our misunderstanding may be a result of not understanding history.

Barandes and his collaborators have investigated whether these quantum correlations can be understood using an alternative mathematical framework while respecting causal restrictions associated with the speed of light.

They have derived an important limit on the strength of quantum correlations, known as the Tsirelson bound. For our purposes, the mathematical details are less important than the implication. Some behavior that appears mysterious under one mathematical description may become more understandable under another.

Barandes has not established that his interpretation is the unique correct account of reality. His framework has not yet produced a distinctive experimental prediction that separates it from conventional quantum mechanics.

But he has shown that our interpretation of a mathematical description is not necessarily the only way to understand quantum phenomena. And that brings us back to a larger question.

Part Two: Is Mathematics Reality?

Thirty-three thousand successful experiments

I have conducted an experiment more than 33,000 times. Every time, 33,000 consecutive tests, it has succeeded. Should I conclude that I have found a Law of Nature?

The experiment?  I went to sleep and subsequently awakened, 33,000 times in a row. If past experimental success establishes a universal law, shouldn’t I conclude that I will awaken forever? Obviously, that would be ridiculous.

But the example illustrates something important about prediction. Every experiment takes place under different circumstances. The person who awakened yesterday is not physically identical to the person who awakens today. His body has changed. His brain has changed. His surroundings have changed.

His history has changed.

Scientists repeat experiments by reproducing the conditions they believe matter. They do not reproduce the entire universe. And they can’t know with certainty that every unmeasured difference is irrelevant.

This doesn’t make scientific experiments worthless. Quite the contrary. Repeated results provide powerful evidence. But evidence that a mathematical model works is not proof that the model is reality itself.

Mathematics is just an analogy for reality

A map is an analogy for the territory it describes. A musical score represents music, but it is not the sound. Likewise, a mathematical equation can describe the relationships between physical things without being those things.

When mathematics is applied to physical reality, it may be interpreted to represent selected aspects of that reality. It may seem accurate. But accuracy doesn’t establish physical identity.

Newton’s mathematics described gravity successfully for centuries. Einstein subsequently described gravity differently, with predictions that better explain certain observations. The planets didn’t change when Einstein published his theory. Our mathematical description changed.

This raises the possibility that some of the mysteries of quantum mechanics arise not from nature itself, but from our interpretation of the mathematics we use to describe nature.

Everything we know is an interpretation by our brain. We see what our brain interprets as a red chair. But what is the reality? Light waves have entered our eyes and our brain interprets them as a red chair. But the reality is that they are just photons. We can apply mathematics to try to explain why we see red and a chair, but those mathematics must be interpreted. They, in themselves, are not a red chair.

If everything we see, hear, feel, taste and smell is an interpretation of stimuli, what is reality? If mathematics itself is a analogy, by definition, that is not reality, nor is interpretation. Both analogy and interpretation are imperfect representations of reality. 

According to Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle, there are some things we never can know. It’s not that these things don’t exist. It’s that we cannot know them.

Barandes’s work provides a reason to take that possibility seriously. But first, I want I want to ask what a physical entity actually is.

Part Three: I Am My History

What makes you, you?

Suppose I show you a photograph of yourself at age five. You look different. You think differently. You possess different knowledge and memories. Almost everything about your present physical condition has changed. Yet you say, “That’s me.” Why?

What connects that child to the person you are today? My answer is:

I AM MY HISTORY.

I don’t mean that my history resembles me, or that my history influences me. I mean that my entire history constitutes what I am. Every experience, every physical interaction, every change in my body, and every event that contributed to my existence has helped produce my present condition.

I am not a static object that possesses a history as an additional attribute. I am the present culmination of that history.

History + Stimulus → Response → New History

Consider a simple example. You touch a hot stove. You withdraw your hand. The heat is a stimulus. Withdrawing your hand is a response. But that response changes your history.

Perhaps you suffer a burn. Perhaps you learn to be more cautious. Perhaps the experience changes how you respond to another stove. Years later, your next response occurs under different conditions because your history has changed. This continuing process can be summarized:

History + Stimulus → Response → New History

And the process repeats. Nothing stands outside that sequence. Every response becomes part of the history affecting subsequent responses. The same principle applies to animals, plants, machines, and inanimate objects.

A rock exposed to sunlight warms. Rain erodes its surface. Pressure may alter its internal structure. Each interaction contributes to what the rock subsequently becomes.

A drop of dye in water

Imagine the ocean. Add a drop of red dye. The water changes. Add another drop. The second drop enters water that already has been changed by the first. Continue adding drops of different colors.

Eventually, you may have no practical way to determine when each drop entered or where its molecules originally traveled. Yet the mixture before you is the cumulative result of everything that happened to it. Every new drop encounters a mixture altered by its previous history.

That is physical existence. Every stimulus produces a response within a system already shaped by countless earlier responses.

The present is history in its current configuration.

The dye analogy does not prove that every microscopic detail of the past remains recoverable or observationally effective. But it illustrates why treating the present as independent of the past can be misleading.

Even a chair has a history

Consider a wooden chair. We might say the chair began to exist when a carpenter assembled it. But where did the wood come from? A tree. Where did the tree come from? A seed, nutrients, water, sunlight, and countless physical interactions.

And the atoms composing the tree? They have histories extending far beyond the tree’s existence. The chair is a particular present arrangement arising from those histories. Calling it a chair is convenient. It helps us communicate. But the label doesn’t tell us what the object’s history.

The same applies to a human being. I was born in 1935. But the matter and physical processes that contributed to my existence didn’t begin in 1935.

Their histories extend backward through earlier generations, earlier organisms, the formation of Earth, and the processes that produced the chemical elements. How far back does my history extend?

At least billions of years. Perhaps it has no ultimate beginning. What came before “The Big Bang”? We don’t know. But choosing a date on which to begin calling something by a particular name doesn’t establish that its underlying physical history began on that date. Every atom of my being has a history, a path that had an effect on other atoms, and they on yet others.

These effects, these stimuli and responses do not simply vanish. They leave an indelible mark on the the universe. Information is not destroyed. And I, today, am the culmination.

Can two things ever be exactly identical?

Physicists tell us that electrons possess identical intrinsic properties. Every electron has the same mass and electrical charge. But does that make every electron the same physical entity?

What about location? Momentum? Direction of motion? Relationships with surrounding particles and fields? These are aspects of physical condition that can differ. Although quantum mechanics asks whether individual identical particles possess distinguishable identities at all, the broader question remains. Can any two things be truly identical? Can they have identical histories?

Imagine two complex entities that have experienced billions of years of different interactions. How many stimuli have they encountered? How many responses have followed? How many subsequent responses have been affected by those earlier changes? 

Now consider the possibility that every physical property of the two entities could become exactly identical. Not approximately identical. Not identical according to a few measurements. Identical in every possible physical respect.

That seems extraordinarily unlikely for two independently evolving, highly complex systems. Everyone one of their atoms would have to have had exactly the same history, at the same time, in the same place.

Some physical models permit different histories to produce the same observable condition. Reversible microscopic models, by contrast, preserve distinctions between complete states under their specified evolution. So the question isn’t settled merely by pointing to the enormous number of interactions.

But that number gives us reason to question whether any two complex physical histories ever produce precisely identical complete physical conditions. And it suggests that what we call identical may simply mean indistinguishable by the measurements we currently know how to make.

Does history ever disappear?

Suppose a drop of dye becomes so thoroughly mixed into water that nobody can identify its original location. Has its history disappeared? Or have the consequences of that history become too complicated to reconstruct? These are different possibilities.

Physics contains powerful principles about the conservation of information, particularly in reversible descriptions of physical processes. But the question of how historical information persists, especially when systems interact with their environments, is not trivial. It may be impossible in practice to reconstruct the past even when information remains encoded in the complete physical system.

I am unique because “I am my history.” I am the unbroken chain of Stimulus —>Response —>Response —>Respose , , , with no known beginning and possibly no end unless the universe itself has an endpoint.

Part Four: What Does This Mean for Quantum Mechanics?

Barandes’s work and my proposition are not the same. He has developed a mathematical framework that reproduces quantum predictions using a different interpretation of mathematical processes. I am proposing a way of understanding identity.

But there is an interesting connection. Both approaches invite us to question the assumption that a mathematical description of the present captures everything relevant to physical reality.

Barandes shows how quantum mechanics can be interpreted by other than simple probability models. My proposition is that every physical entity is the culmination of its causal history. Neither proposition proves the other. And neither establishes that quantum mechanics is wrong.

Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of Barandes’s work is that he tries to preserve quantum mechanics’ successful predictions while changing how we understand them. That is the distinction I find most compelling.

We need not reject successful mathematics to question whether its familiar interpretation describes reality.

An electron may seem to behave strangely because it somehow exists in multiple contradictory conditions. Perhaps some of the strangeness comes from our mathematical representation and the assumptions we attach to it. Barandes has offered one rigorous way to explore that possibility.

My own suspicion is broader: We understand physical entities incompletely whenever we treat their present descriptions as though their histories were irrelevant.

Conclusion: What Is a Thing?

We ordinarily describe things by their present characteristics. A chair has four legs. A person has a name. An electron has a mass and a charge. These descriptions are useful.

But are they descriptions of what those things fundamentally are? A photograph isn’t a person. A map isn’t a territory. A mathematical equation isn’t the physical reality it describes. Mathematics is an analogy, and analogies, by definition, are not the same as their subject.

A present measurement isn’t the entire history that produced the measured condition. Every entity exists as the continuing consequence of physical interactions. Every stimulus produces a unique response. Every response uniquely changes the circumstances under which future responses occur.

The process never stands still.

I am not exactly what I was yesterday. Nor will I be exactly what I am today when tomorrow arrives. Yet there is continuity. That continuity is not the permanence of an unchanging object. It is the continuing development of a history.

Let a single drop of water fall into an  ocean and that ocean is permanently changed. We may or may not be able to detect that change, but our detection ability does not change reality. In fact, every attempt to detect the change will itself change the history of the ocean.

Now that you have read this post, your history has changed. You have changed and your response  to stimuli will be different.

I AM MY HISTORY.

And I suggest the same is true of everything else.

Sources and further reading

New Scientist, “Is Schrödinger’s cat both dead and alive? No, it’s just haunted by its past” (November 2026).
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2595461-is-schrodingers-cat-both-dead-and-alive-no-its-just-haunted-by-its-past/

Jacob A. Barandes, “The Stochastic-Quantum Correspondence,” Philosophy of Physics (2025).
https://doi.org/10.31389/pop.186

Jacob A. Barandes, “Quantum Systems as Indivisible Stochastic Processes,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2026).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2026.102213

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell