# **Reality As Persistent Interference: Beyond Collapse and Particles** The double-slit experiment stands as one of the most revealing demonstrations in physics, not because it shows particles behaving as waves, but because it reveals that what we call “quantum behavior” is fundamentally about interference patterns in information. When electrons or photons are sent individually through the slits, they still produce an interference pattern over time. This cannot be explained by any classical notion of particles or waves—it suggests instead that the system maintains a coherent informational structure that only manifests as discrete detection events when measured. The interference pattern is not some mysterious property of “wave-particle duality” but rather the visible signature of how quantum systems encode multiple possible outcomes simultaneously. This is not abstraction; it is what the mathematics of quantum mechanics directly describes—a probability amplitude distribution that interferes with itself. Holograms operate on remarkably similar principles. A holographic plate stores not an image but an interference pattern between light that has scattered off an object and a reference beam. When reconstructed, this pattern reproduces the original light field, creating the illusion of a three-dimensional object. Crucially, the hologram does not select any particular viewpoint—all possible perspectives are encoded simultaneously in the interference fringes. Your observation angle merely determines which part of this informational structure gets reconstructed. This is strikingly analogous to quantum systems where measurement appears to “collapse” possibilities into one outcome, while the full interference pattern (the complete quantum state) may persist in some form. The hologram demonstrates that multiple states can coexist in an interference pattern without any mystical collapse mechanism. This challenges the very notion of wavefunction collapse in quantum mechanics. The idea that observation forces a quantum system to “choose” a state may simply be an artifact of our limited measurement techniques—just as tilting a hologram only shows one perspective at a time, our quantum measurements only extract partial information from the full interference pattern. Modern weak measurement techniques have already shown that we can extract some information from quantum systems without fully collapsing them, suggesting that the supposed “collapse” is more about information extraction than any fundamental physical process. The holographic analogy implies that the complete quantum state may continue to exist in some form even after measurement—we simply lose access to its full interference properties through our coarse detection methods. The resolution limits in our observations further reinforce this informational perspective. Visible light holograms are constrained by the wavelength of light used—typically around 500 nanometers—which limits the fineness of detail they can record. Similarly, our ability to resolve quantum phenomena is constrained by the energy scales of our probes. Electron microscopes use picometer-scale wavelengths to infer atomic structure, but they don’t “see” atoms directly—they reconstruct spatial information from scattering patterns. In both cases, what we call “resolution” is really about how much information we can extract from the system. Shorter wavelengths provide higher information density, not because they magically “see smaller things” but because they interact with finer details of the underlying informational structure. This leads to a radical but empirically grounded view: quantum systems, like holograms, may fundamentally exist as persistent interference patterns—informational structures that only appear to collapse because our measurements are destructive. The universe might not operate through discrete particles and sudden collapses, but through continuous, uncollapsed information structures that we sample through interaction. This perspective dissolves the artificial boundary between quantum and classical physics—both are just different regimes of information processing, with “collapse” being what happens when our measurement resolution is too coarse to preserve the full interference pattern. The implications are profound: if we could develop measurement techniques that preserve quantum coherence (as holograms preserve all viewing angles), we might find that quantum states never truly collapse at all—they simply await interrogation.