Quantum Jumps

The image of the “quantum jump” is one of the most misleading metaphors in modern physics. It conjures a picture of electrons vaulting across gulfs of space, as though subatomic particles were tiny acrobats leaping between planets. This is a residue of classical thinking, which insists on imagining change as motion through space and time.

But what quantum mechanics actually models is not a leap through a background, but a change in relational possibility. When we speak of an electron “jumping” from one orbital to another, nothing is traversed. No gap is crossed. Instead, what shifts is the configuration of potential — a re-structuring of systemic possibility.

Calling this a “jump” traps us in a spatialised metaphor, as if the atom were a miniature solar system and electrons were just impatient planets. What’s at stake, however, is not movement across distance but a perspectival cut: the actualisation of one relational pattern out of many.

To cling to the image of a jump is to miss the ontology that quantum mechanics reveals: not objects vaulting through void, but systemic potentials shifting into instance.