Jacob Barandes and the Quantum Puzzle: Cracking Reality’s Blueprint

Hey Fellow Thinkers,

Dylan Curious here, and today I’m bringing you into the trenches of one of the biggest debates in physics: what’s really under the hood of our universe?

I recently tuned into a fascinating discussion with Harvard physicist Jacob Barandes, and it got me hooked. You’ve probably heard whispers of the theory that everything boils down to information. Not atoms. Not energy. Information. John Wheeler famously called it “it from bit,” hinting that our universe could be nothing more than answers to cosmic yes/no questions.

But Barandes isn’t buying it wholesale. He points out something we often overlook: information can’t exist without a platform. A computer needs its silicon circuits. The universe needs... well, something. But what?

Here’s where it gets even more interesting. Jacob flips the standard quantum narrative on its head. In the traditional storyline, quantum mechanics revolves around the wave function—this enigmatic object guiding particles and probabilities. But Barandes questions why we assume the wave function should be the main character at all.

Instead, he digs deep into an alternative known as the algebraic formulation of quantum theory. By starting with C*-algebras—a type of mathematical structure—he sidesteps wave functions entirely at first. In this framework, wave functions and Hilbert spaces don’t kick off the show. They emerge later, as by-products of something more fundamental.

To me, this feels like peeling back the layers of reality and finding a completely different script hiding underneath the one we’ve memorized. It’s like discovering there’s a director’s cut of the universe, and we’ve only seen the trailer.

The question that lingers: Have we been looking through the wrong lens this entire time?

I’ll be mulling this one over for a while, and I bet you will too.

Warmly,
Dylan Curious