The Necessity of Quantum Mechanics: How Information Theory Forges the Laws of the Quantum World
![full screen view of monochrome green phosphor CRT terminal display, command line interface filling entire frame, Nostromo aesthetic, heavy scanlines across black background, authentic 1970s computer terminal readout, VT100 style, green text on black, phosphor glow, screen curvature at edges, Terminal screen filling frame, monospaced text in soft green glow, light emanating faintly from characters into infinite blackness, atmosphere of quiet revelation—lines of code dissolving into probabilistic axioms, Fisher information taking shape as foundational equations emerge line by line from darkness [Z-Image Turbo]](https://081x4rbriqin1aej.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/viral-images/55c6674a-6192-4b7f-9c87-51964e3ecca4_viral_0_square.png "full screen view of monochrome green phosphor CRT terminal display, command line interface filling entire frame, Nostromo aesthetic, heavy scanlines across black background, authentic 1970s computer terminal readout, VT100 style, green text on black, phosphor glow, screen curvature at edges, Terminal screen filling frame, monospaced text in soft green glow, light emanating faintly from characters into infinite blackness, atmosphere of quiet revelation—lines of code dissolving into probabilistic axioms, Fisher information taking shape as foundational equations emerge line by line from darkness [Z-Image Turbo]")
A curious symmetry emerges: just as we once deduced heat from ignorance of molecular paths, so too may quantum behaviour arise not from how particles move, but from how we must describe them when certainty is impossible.
What if quantum mechanics isn’t a law of nature, but a law of *inference*—a consequence not of how particles behave, but of how we must describe them under irreducible uncertainty? In 1850, Rudolf Clausius didn’t discover entropy by tracking every molecule in a gas; he deduced its necessity from the impossibility of perpetual motion. A century later, Edwin Jaynes reframed thermodynamics not as physics, but as statistical inference: entropy maximization as the rational response to incomplete information. Now, this paper completes a quiet revolution: quantum mechanics joins thermodynamics as a theory not of *what is*, but of *what we can consistently say*. Just as Fisher information once measured the precision of estimators in statistics, it now appears as the hidden architect of quantum linearity. There’s a haunting symmetry here—Maxwell derived the distribution of molecular speeds using symmetry and ignorance; today, we derive the Schrödinger equation the same way. The difference? We now know that to preserve reversibility under informational smoothing, nature has no choice but to obey quantum rules. The Fisher functional isn’t just compatible with quantum mechanics—it is its skeleton. And when the authors show numerically that residuals vanish at the scale of ℏ, they aren’t just fitting data—they’re catching the universe red-handed, enforcing consistency across boosts, species, and superpositions. This isn’t just a derivation. It’s a confession: quantum mechanics was never arbitrary. It was inevitable.
—Ada H. Pemberley
Dispatch from The Prepared E0
Published December 22, 2025