Research manifesto

I want to understand nature from the bottom up: what might exist beneath the descriptions in our theories, how it behaves, and how familiar laws arise from it. I pursue this question through two related lines of research—complexity and emergence, and the foundations of quantum mechanics. They share an approach, though I do not assume they already have a single answer.

Complexity and emergence

How do simple local interactions give rise to persistent structures and higher-level laws? When can a system be understood through a small set of macroscopic variables with a dynamics of their own? When does that description fail because it has left out a relevant variable, a spatial relationship, or a piece of history?

I am especially interested in how the answers change across ordered, critical, and chaotic regimes. Near a phase transition, a system may become harder to predict with a few short-memory variables even as its large-scale statistical behavior becomes more universal. I want to understand when that tension reflects the system itself and when it comes from the way we chose to observe it.

My near-term project is a controlled study of a cellular automaton near a phase transition. Starting from explicit local rules, I want to choose macroscopic observables, test how well they predict what happens next, and measure what information is missing when they fail. Would a local correlation, a recognizable structure such as an interface, or a short history repair the model? Would the answer survive changes of scale and initial conditions?

Foundations of quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics is another place to ask what lies beneath a remarkably successful description. I am especially interested in the interpretation of the wavefunction: which aspects of it, Schrödinger dynamics, and the Hilbert-space formalism describe physical reality, and which reflect what we can know? Any proposed answer must take seriously the constraints imposed by Bell’s theorem.

One direction I am developing brings Hamilton–Jacobi mechanics together with Gibbs ensembles. Particles could be soliton-like structures sustained by nonlinear dynamics, while the Schrödinger equation describes aspects of their emergent statistical behavior. The wavefunction would combine information about a particle’s whereabouts with phase information tied to those underlying dynamics. In this picture, the Born rule is a natural outcome of mapping an ontological probability space into complex Hilbert space. I outline these working ideas on the physics page.

Where the two threads meet

Both lines of research ask how a powerful description at one level might arise from a deeper account of reality—and what is lost or gained in moving between levels. In complexity science, I can begin with known local rules and examine whether useful macroscopic laws emerge. In quantum foundations, the underlying ontology is itself uncertain, so the task also involves asking which candidate pictures could reproduce the phenomena that quantum theory explains.

The cellular-automaton study is a tractable experiment in emergence, not a proposed derivation of quantum mechanics. I hope the discipline of moving carefully from explicit dynamics to emergent descriptions will sharpen the questions I ask in both fields.

How I work

I want to distinguish established results from interpretations and working conjectures. A useful outcome could be a successful reduced law, but it could also be a clear account of why a plausible reduction fails. I want assumptions, prediction errors, counterexamples, and the limits of each model to remain visible. In quantum foundations, reproducing a probability at one moment is only a beginning; preparations, interference, sequential interventions, and Bell correlations provide more demanding tests.

An invitation

This is a research compass, not a claim that these questions are settled. I value intellectual freedom, careful criticism, and collaborators willing to work through tractable problems. If you work in complexity science, statistical physics, dynamical systems, quantum foundations, mathematics, or philosophy of physics—and these questions resonate with you—please get in touch.