The title is a deliberate nod to Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality.
I am doing something far more modest. This is not the road to reality, but a lane to classicality:
How the blurry, probabilistic quantum world becomes the crisp, definite world we inhabit.
A Royal Society historian once wrote about Outsider Scientists:
A glance from an angle can sometimes reveal a new aspect of nature.
That line has stayed with me. It captures the spirit in which I approach what follows—not as a professional physicist staking territory, but as an outsider scientist taking a careful, testable glance at a question physicists seem to have been discussing for some time.
This post is a companion to my new paper (now on arXiv):
Spontaneous Decoherence from Imaginary-Order Spectral Deformations.
The math used here – Imaginary-order (not Real-valued Fractional) Calculus – is very interesting and unique in its own right. That is for a different post.
This paper adds to 60+ years of modeling attempts at reconciling:
Classical Reality with Quantum Foundations.
A Brief History of Decoherence
Quantum systems superpose. They interfere. They phase-lock and dephase. And yet the macroscopic world—chairs, coffee cups, committees—refuses to cooperate. Somewhere between electrons and elephants, quantum possibility drains away.
For decades, the standard answer has been environmental decoherence. The world is noisy. Nothing is isolated. A system becomes entangled with degrees of freedom we do not track, and interference disappears from the reduced description. The universe remains unitary; our bookkeeping does not. This story is mathematically sound, experimentally validated, and enormously useful.
It is also, in a certain philosophical sense, unsatisfying.
Some physicists therefore asked a sharper question: what if decoherence is not merely practical, but fundamental? What if quantum mechanics itself frays, ever so slightly, as systems grow large or heavy or temporally extended? That question led to gravitational collapse models, stochastic reductions of the wavefunction, and clock-based limits on time evolution. These ideas were bold. They were testable. And so far, nature has politely declined to cooperate.
Experiments have improved, bounds have tightened, and quantum mechanics—annoyingly resilient—continues to hold.
A third perspective, closer in spirit to relativity and geometry, reframed the issue entirely. Perhaps coherence never truly disappears. Perhaps it merely becomes inaccessible. Horizons, locality, and restricted observables conspire to make interference operationally meaningless, even though the global quantum state evolves unitarily. Decoherence, in this view, is not something the universe does; it is something observers experience.
Each of these perspectives captures something true. Each leaves something unresolved.
Which brings us, somewhat improbably, to an outsider. (Hint: me!)
Academic Hedonism
By training and profession, I live comfortably in applied worlds: optimization, supply chains, healthcare, venture capital, and enterprises (commercial and social) where success is measured by whether something works, scales, and creates value.
But intellectual life, at its best, allows for a certain hedonism—the pleasure of asking questions that are not strictly necessary.
The quantum-to-classical transition is one such question. Here is my modest offering:
Imaginary-order spectral deformation (IOSD) proposes that decoherence can arise intrinsically without stochasticity, collapse, dissipation, or any violation of global unitarity. The mechanism is geometric rather than probabilistic: interference is suppressed by spectral phase cancellation induced by a deformation of the Hamiltonian’s functional calculus. Nothing collapses. Nothing leaks into an environment. The evolution remains exactly unitary. It preserves quantum mechanics’ core structure, and makes experimentally testable predictions.
A Poetic Intuition
Echoing John Wheeler’s famous dictum that space tells matter how to move and matter tells space how to curve, it is tempting to summarize the spirit of the IOSD mechanism in a single line:
Energy tells time how to tick; time tells energy how to decohere.
This line is intended as an intuition rather than as a literal dynamical feedback loop. In the formalism, time remains the usual external evolution parameter, exactly as in ordinary quantum mechanics.
The Importance of Being Testable
What makes IOSD interesting, in my view, is not its audacity but its restraint – I know many of you must be shocked at this! – and because:
It is eminently falsifiable.
In platforms where environmental noise is already well characterized—superconducting qubits, trapped ions, NV centers—one can look for residual coherence envelopes that no open-system model predicts. IOSD will either be ruled out or bounded sharply.
I have asked my colleagues at IIT-Madras if their labs can run experiments to test:
Can interference die without anything actually being lost?
Whether IOSD joins the lineage or quietly exits, it will be decided the same way all serious ideas in science should be decided:
Not by interpretation, but by experiment.
Either way, the pleasure lies in finding things out!
