Quantum Revolution

Designing the Future in an Interconnected World

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1. The End of The Illusion

For centuries, we believed the world was made of separate things, bouncing around like billiard balls in a grand cosmic game. Indeed, the classical view of reality has shaped not only science, but our entire way of thinking about the world and ourselves. The universe, we believed, was composed of discrete objects, separate, local and fully describable by deterministic laws. This vision, born in ancient Greek Philosophy and crystallized by Newtonian mechanics, taught us to understand the world through reduction: i.e. to explain the whole by dissecting its parts. It gave us powerful tools, profound insights and a language of clarity and precision.

As our knowledge advanced —first through relativity, and then more radically through quantum theory— the classical picture began to fray [1]. It wasn’t just that particles could be waves or that probabilities replaced certainties. It was the recognition that the very notion of isolated systems might be fundamentally flawed. In the quantum world, systems are entangled, identities are contextual and the boundaries we draw are often provisional. Whether we subscribe to the Copenhagen interpretation, Many Worlds, pilot-wave theories or any other quantum philosophy [2], a consistent thread runs through them all: the classical view is, at best, an approximation —a special case, not the whole story. At worst it is just an illusion.

This doesn’t just challenge how we do physics. It invites us to rethink how we understand the world at every level. From ecosystems to economies, from computation to consciousness, we are confronting complex, interdependent realities that do not behave like clockwork.

So, if the world is no longer classical, then what is it? Is it truly quantum —down to its very bones— or is quantum theory merely pointing beyond itself, toward a deeper and still-unwritten language of nature? The answer is not yet there. But what I hold here is: we can no longer believe the classical illusion. More importantly, we can no longer reinforce its practical implications on our lives at a global scale.

2. What Do We Mean by “Classical”?

To understand what it means to move beyond the classical view, we first need to understand what the classical view actually is.

In physics, “classical” refers to a set of assumptions and principles that shaped our conception of nature from Galileo and Newton to the early 20th century. These assumptions are widely held by many even today. Furthermore, the non-classical views of the quantum world, no matter how much higher predictive power they have, are hardly understood even today and, sometimes, also considered as disturbing to those who find themselves at home with a classical view.

At its core, classical physics assumes that the universe is made up of well-defined objects, moving through space and time according to deterministic laws. If you know the initial conditions of a system —its positions, velocities, forces— you can, in principle, predict its future indefinitely. This is the legacy of determinism.

Closely tied to this is the assumption of locality: that objects influence one another only through direct contact or via fields that propagate through space at finite speeds. Interactions are constrained by space and time and nothing can affect something else “instantaneously” at a distance.

Then comes separability: the belief that a system can be meaningfully divided into independent parts and that those parts have intrinsic properties regardless of what else exists in the universe. And finally, objectivity: the idea that the observer plays no role in the behavior of the system being observed —that the universe “out there” exists in full definiteness, regardless of whether or how we observe it.

These principles did not only shape physics textbooks. They underpinned the design of machines, economies, educational systems, even ideologies. The Industrial Revolution was built on them. So were bureaucracies, legal frameworks, and modern computation. The classical worldview was a worldview of control, predictability, and fragmentation —a world that could be broken into manageable pieces.

But over time, cracks appeared in this edifice. Thermodynamics revealed an arrow of time, an inherent irreversibility not easily reconciled with Newtonian mechanics [3]. Chaos theory, emerging within classical physics itself, showed how deterministic systems could be unpredictable both in theory and practice [4]. And most radically, Quantum Physics challenged the idea that physical systems possess definite properties independent of how they are measured —suggesting instead that outcomes arise from an interplay between system, context and measurement process.

In short, the assumptions of determinism, locality, separability and objectivity remain effective within certain domains —even though their applicability is bounded. Specifically, they work fine in certain regimes —macroscopic, low-energy, weakly entangled systems— but they are not fundamental. And if they are not fundamental, we must ask: what lies beneath them? What replaces them when they break down?

This is where quantum theory enters —not just as a better physics, but as an invitation to rethink the architecture of our understanding.

3. The Quantum Turn: What Reality is This?

As the boundaries of classical physics began to strain under the weight of new phenomena, a radically new framework emerged —Quantum Mechanics— not as an extension of the old, but as a profound reconfiguration of what it means to describe reality.

Quantum theory introduced a vocabulary that challenged classical intuition. Superposition tells us that systems can exist in multiple, seemingly contradictory states at once —until an interaction brings about a particular outcome. Entanglement reveals that the state of one system may be correlated with another in a way that defies any explanation based on local, independent properties. Uncertainty brings with it the consequence that not all measurable quantities can be simultaneously well-defined; the more precisely we know one, the less precisely we can know the other. And non-locality, strictly tied to entanglement, made manifest through the violation of Bell inequalities, demonstrates that no theory based on local hidden variables can reproduce all the predictions of quantum mechanics [5].

What unites these features is not simply their strangeness but their systemic implications. In quantum theory, systems cannot be fully understood in isolation¹. Their properties arise, in part, through their relations —relations to other systems, to measuring devices, to the broader context in which they are embedded. The assumption of independence, so central to the classical worldview, gives way to a framework built on interaction and correlation.

Moreover, quantum theory challenges the ideal of perfect knowledge. Where classical mechanics promised certainty given enough information, quantum mechanics offers only probabilities —not merely due to ignorance, but as a built-in feature of the theory itself. This is not randomness in the colloquial sense, but a precise structure that resists classical explanation.

The decisive turning point came with Bell’s theorem in 1964. Bell showed that if a physical theory assumes both that physical influences cannot travel faster than light (locality) and that physical properties exist with definite values before being measured (realism), then it must obey certain mathematical limits known as Bell inequalities. Experiments, beginning with those of Aspect in the 1980s [6] and continually refined since, have violated these inequalities, confirming the reality of non-locality. While debates continue over the correct interpretation of these results, the empirical verdict is clear: quantum correlations are real, robust and irreducible to classical terms. This is huge.

This is the quantum turn: a shift not only in our equations, but in our metaphysics. The picture of a world made of separate, determinate parts gives way to a world of entangled wholes, emergent properties and intrinsic uncertainty. It is a world where the observer and the observed are not absolutely separable and where what is real may not always be what is measurable.

Whether this new reality is strange or simply unfamiliar depends on how attached we are to the classical lenses. But what is increasingly clear is that the classical lenses —powerful and still useful within many regimes— are not sufficient to describe the foundations of the physical world.

4. Beyond Physics

For much of the 20th century, Quantum Theory was seen as a theory of the very small —of electrons, atoms, and subatomic particles. It was the strange machinery behind the scenes, hidden from the “ordinary” world by the comforting regularities of classical behavior. But over the last few decades, this view has steadily eroded. We are beginning to see that quantum principles do not merely apply to exotic laboratory conditions —they may be foundational to how we understand life, intelligence and information itself.

Quantum Information and Computing

Perhaps one of the most profound unifying ideas to emerge in recent decades is that information itself is a physical quantity and, in the quantum domain, it behaves in radically new ways. Quantum information theory has given us tools to describe how information can be stored, transmitted and protected in systems that obey quantum laws [7]. This leads to technologies such as quantum cryptography, which allows for cryptographic communication that is, in principle, immune to eavesdropping —not because it is too complex to break, but because any attempt to observe it irreversibly alters the system [8].

In quantum memory and quantum networks, we glimpse the future of communication —not just faster or more secure, but built on fundamentally new principles of coherence, entanglement, and contextuality.

Take quantum computing, for instance. Unlike classical computers, which process information as sequences of 0s and 1s, quantum computers use qubits —quantum bits that can exist in superpositions of states. More powerfully still, qubits can become entangled, meaning their states are correlated in ways that no classical system can replicate. The result is a form of computation that does not follow a single path through a decision tree but rather explores multiple pathways simultaneously, with interference guiding the final result.

This is not simply “faster computing.” It is a qualitatively different paradigm of problem-solving, one suited to optimization, complex simulation, cryptography and possibly even new forms of artificial intelligence.

Quantum Biology

In the life sciences, a quiet revolution is underway. Research in quantum biology suggests that quantum effects —once thought too delicate for the warm, wet world of the cell— may in fact play a role in some of life’s most fundamental processes. Experiments point to quantum coherence in photosynthesis, where energy appears to be transferred across molecules not via random hopping, but through wavelike interference patterns that optimize the flow [9].

Similarly, in olfaction, quantum tunneling may allow receptors to distinguish between molecules not by shape alone, but by vibrational spectra [10].

Even more controversially, many have proposed that cognition itself may involve quantum processes, though these ideas are still hotly debated [11] [12].

Well before many of these experimental breakthroughs, pioneering theoretical work by Emilio Del Giudice and Giuseppe Vitiello laid important conceptual foundations. Drawing on a theoretical model based on quantum field theory², they proposed that coherent electromagnetic fields play a fundamental role in biological self-organization, particularly in water. Their research introduced the idea of coherent domains, regions within liquid water where molecules oscillate in phase through long-range correlations, giving rise to collective behaviors that transcend classical descriptions.

In their 1995 paper [13], Del Giudice and colleagues argued that biological structures may emerge through field-mediated interactions, with water acting not merely as a passive solvent, but as an active quantum medium sustaining coherence across cellular environments.

At the same time, for example in [14] Giuseppe Vitiello explored how quantum coherence and spontaneous symmetry breaking might underlie not only biological order but also memory and cognition in the brain, emphasizing the importance of field-theoretic frameworks in understanding living systems.

The broader point I want to make here is this: life, in its most refined expressions, may be exploiting quantum structures not in spite of their fragility, but because of their capacity for subtle interconnection and efficient coordination— traits that mirror the non-classical behavior seen in quantum systems. In this light, biology may not be resisting quantum laws, but rather expressing them in new, emergent forms.

Quantum Decision Theory

Another frontier where quantum theory is quietly reshaping thinking is decision science and cognitive modeling. Classical decision theory assumes that people make choices by weighing probabilities and utilities in a rational, context-independent way. But empirical research has consistently shown that real human decisions often don’t follow this logic: choices depend on context, sequence, framing and are subject to interference-like effects that resemble phenomena from quantum mechanics.

In response, researchers have developed quantum models of cognition and decision-making, where mental states are represented in Hilbert spaces and choices emerge through projections analogous to quantum measurements [15]. These models have successfully explained anomalies such as order effects in surveys, conjunction and disjunction fallacies and violations of the sure-thing principle, where classical probability theory fails. This makes the pair with tons of literature in Cognitive Science.

What makes this approach powerful is not a literal claim that the brain is a quantum computer, but rather that the mathematical structures of quantum theory offer a better language for modeling complex, context-sensitive cognition.

This line of work suggests that quantum theory’s core features —superposition, contextuality, and entanglement— may offer not only insights into the physical world, but also into the structure of thought, judgment, and perception, helping to bridge the gap between formal models and the richness of human experience.

5. A Metaphor Shift: From Machines to Systems

As we have held, the dominant metaphor for understanding the world was the machine. Nature was imagined as a collection of parts: cogs, levers, and wheels —each with a function, each acting independently, all coordinated by external rules. This imagery, inspired by the success of classical mechanics, shaped not only science but also our technologies, economies, institutions, and ultimately our self-understanding.

But quantum theory compels us to think differently. It reveals a world not composed of isolated parts, but of relations, processes and patterns of entanglement. Entities in quantum theory do not exist in fixed, self-contained states, but in states of potential —states that are defined in relation to other systems, in particular contexts, and that change when those contexts change.

This shift is more than academic. It represents a deep transformation in how we metaphorically think about the world [16]—from parts to wholes, from causation to correlation, from control to interaction. Quantum thinking invites us to replace the metaphor of the machine with that of a system: a web of interdependencies, feedback loops and emergent behaviors [17]. In such systems, wholes are more than the sum of their parts and understanding any part requires understanding the network it belongs to.

From Physics to Systems Practice

In our own time, this metaphor shift is no longer optional, it is urgent. The crises we face today — biodiversity loss, global inequality, systemic mental health decline, climate change, geopolitical tensions— are not problems of faulty components, but of fragile interconnections. They are the symptoms of a civilization that has treated the world as modular, decomposable and dominable. But the planet, like the quantum world, is not classical.

Sustainability, for example, cannot be engineered through linear interventions. It requires systems thinking: recognizing feedback, thresholds and long-range correlations. Ecosystems don’t obey central command; they self-organize. So must our strategies for planetary health and global governance.

Similarly, in Medicine and mental health, the reductionist search for isolated causes has often failed to capture the complexity of human experience. Trauma, cognition, emotion and environment form feedback networks whose behaviors resemble non-linear, probabilistic systems more than classical chains of cause and effect. This introduces new ways of thinking about treatment which would be more humane and gentle.

Even in economics, the illusion of independent agents optimizing utility is yielding to a richer view: one where context, history and entanglement of choice shape behavior. Markets are not clocks —they are adaptive, dynamic ecosystems.

And in governance and collaboration, the classical logic of zero-sum games —where one’s gain is another’s loss— is proving disastrously inadequate. We inhabit an entangled world, where no nation, institution or species operates in true isolation. What quantum theory suggests at the deepest level is that independence is an illusion and mutual constraint is a condition for coherence, not a limitation.

A New Operating System for Civilization

Embracing this shift requires more than scientific knowledge, it demands a change in cognitive style, institutional design and cultural imagination. Our models, policies, and metaphors must reflect a reality in which each observer matters, boundaries are fluid and stability arises from interaction rather than isolation.

This is not a call to mysticism, but to a deeper realism, a realism that takes entanglement, emergence and interdependence seriously. In the age of complexity, quantum thinking offers more than a theory of the microscopic. It offers a conceptual foundation for how to live, think and govern in an interconnected world.

6. So, Is the World Quantum?

We’ve seen how quantum theory undermines the foundations of classical thought and inspires new paradigms across disciplines — from computation and biology to cognition and governance. But amid this expanding influence, an important and humbling question remains: is the world itself fundamentally quantum?

This is not a question with a settled answer. At one level, quantum theory is undeniably the most successful predictive framework in the history of science. It underlies the behavior of matter and energy at atomic and subatomic scales, powers our semiconductors, lasers and medical imaging and passes experimental tests with extraordinary precision.

But whether quantum physics describes the world “as it is” — or whether it is simply the best tool we currently have for organizing our observations — remains a topic of deep and legitimate debate.

Some argue that quantum theory is universal, that it applies to all physical systems regardless of scale. In this view, the classical world emerges as an approximation —a limit of quantum dynamics when interference effects are neglected. This perspective is supported by increasing experimental evidence showing that quantum phenomena like superposition and entanglement can be sustained in larger and more complex systems, blurring the classical/quantum divide.

Others contend that quantum mechanics is incomplete — a low-energy or coarse-grained limit of a deeper, still-undiscovered theory. Approaches to quantum gravity [18], such as string theory [19] or constructor theory [20], suggest that space, time, and perhaps even quantum mechanics itself may be emergent phenomena, not fundamental ones. Still others explore ontological models where causality, information, or even consciousness plays a role in the quantum fabric.

And then there are the most intriguing questions that cut across disciplines: Is “quantum” merely a descriptor of matter, or is it a logic of interaction, a principle of organization that turns to be useful whenever systems become complex, relational, and self-referential? Can quantum ideas apply not only to particles and fields, but to ecosystems, economies and minds?

These questions remain open. But one conclusion grows harder to escape: the world is not classical. The assumptions that defined classical physics — locality, separability, objectivity— do not hold at the deepest levels of reality. Whether the world is quantum or something yet more subtle, it is certainly not what classical thought presumed.

And that realization carries profound implications. It means that our models —of nature, society, knowledge and even selfhood— must evolve. If the universe is not a machine of separate parts but a web of dynamic relationships, how might our thinking, designing and living begin to reflect that? What happens when we build technologies, institutions and cultures that take interdependence, contextuality and coherence as first principles?

We may not yet know the final theory. But we are already in a different world — one that invites a different way of seeing, and of being.

7. Rethinking Reality

To build the future, we must start by revising the story we tell about the world. That story, it turns out, is no longer the Story of Machines.

We live at a turning point —not only in science, but in worldview. The classical story, for all its past successes, no longer suffices. It gave us clarity, control and calculability. But it also gave us fragmentation, extraction and a dangerous illusion of separation —from each other, from the planet and from the deeper structure of reality itself.

Quantum theory, in all its paradoxes and profundity, asks us to reconsider what we take for granted: that systems can be isolated, that causes act in straight lines, that observers are detached, that certainty is the gold standard of knowledge. These assumptions once served us. Now they limit us.

Rethinking reality is not an exercise in abstraction, it is an act of necessity. The systems we inhabit today —ecological, economic, social and technological— are all entangled. Their behavior cannot be understood, much less guided, through linear reasoning and classical control. We must learn to think in terms of emergence, coherence, context and relational intelligence.

This isn’t just the task of scientists. It is the responsibility of leaders, designers, educators, policymakers, entrepreneurs and visionaries in every field. If the world is not made of things but of processes and relationships, then everything we design —from cities to social rules, from algorithms to alliances— should reflect that.

To think quantumly is not merely to accept uncertainty. It is to recognize that meaning is contextual, that wholes are primary and that the future and past are entangled [21].

The revolution is not just technological. It is epistemic. It is cultural. It is a phase transition of civilization.

And it begins by telling a new story about reality —one that reflects the world we now know we live in and the future we still have the power to shape.

References

[1] Heisenberg, W. (1958). Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science. New York: Harper.

[2] Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge.

[3] Prigogine, I. (1980). From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.

[4] Vulpiani, A. (1994). Determinismo e Caos. Roma: La Nuova Italia Scientifica.

[5] Licata, I. (2003). Osservando la sfinge. La realtà virtuale della fisica quantistica. Roma: Di Renzo Editore.

[6] Aspect, A., Dalibard, J., & Roger, G. (1982). "Experimental Test of Bell's Inequalities Using Time‐Varying Analyzers." Physical Review Letters, 49(25), 1804–1807.

[7] Nielsen M.A. & Chuang I.L. (2010). Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, Cambridge University Press, ISBN: 978-1-107-00217-3

[8] Bacco, D. et al. (2013) Experimental quantum key distribution with finite-key security analysis for noisy channels. Nat Commun. 4: 2363.

[9] Engel, G. S., et al. (2007). "Evidence for wavelike energy transfer through quantum coherence in photosynthetic systems." Nature, 446(7137), 782–786.

[10] Brookes, J. C., et al. (2007). "Could humans recognize odor by phonon assisted tunneling?" Physical Review Letters, 98(3), 038101.

[11] Penrose, R. (1989). The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[12] Atmanspacher, H., & Primas, H. (2006). Quantum Approaches to Consciousness. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

[13] Del Giudice, E. & Preparata, G. (1995). “Coherent dynamics in water as a possible explanation of biological membranes formation”. J Biol Phys 20, 105–116 .

[14] Vitiello, G. (1995). “Dissipation and memory capacity in the quantum brain model”. Int.J.Mod.Phys. B, 973;

[15] Busemeyer, J. R., & Bruza, P. D. (2012). Quantum Models of Cognition and Decision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[16] Laszlo, E. (1996). The Systems View of the World: A Holistic Vision for Our Time. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. (Riedizione aggiornata dell’edizione originale del 1972).

[17] Minati, G. (2001). Esseri collettivi. Sistemica, fenomeni collettivi ed emergenza. Milano: Apogeo.

[18] Rovelli, C. (2004). Quantum Gravity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[19] Smolin, L. (2006). The Trouble with Physics. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

[20] Deutsch, D. (2012). Constructor Theory. arXiv preprint arXiv:1210.7439. Disponibile su: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1210.7439

[21] Silvestrini, P. (2022). La Fisica Sincronica. Youcanprint. ISBN: 9791220371797.

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1. It should be noted that the canonical mathematical formulation of Quantum Mechanics, in its most established form, is based on closed systems. The evolution is unitarily deterministic (via the Schrödinger equation), the dynamics is reversible and it is assumed that the system remains isolated from its environment during this evolution. However, the theory itself shows that no system can truly be understood in isolation. Phenomena such as entanglement and the measurement process imply a structural dependence on context. In practice, every system is open to interactions and defined by the relationships it maintains.

2. In non-perturbative conditions, macroscopic quantum systems interacting dissipatively with the environment do not necessarily undergo decoherence. On the contrary, strong and structured interaction with the environment can give rise to coherent collective phenomena that can only be described beyond the perturbative approach. In such scenarios, the environment does not act as a destructive “noise,” but rather as a functional component of the system’s coherent order. Treating systems as perturbative near the classical limit is an effective and pragmatic simplification, but it also reflects a particular way of thinking — one in which order, separability and linearity are the main tools of understanding. However, quantum field theory in non-perturbative regimes invites us to consider interaction not as a marginal correction to an ideal system, but as the very origin of observable dynamics and structures.