What’s the provocation?
Vedral is pushing something that some theoretical physicists have been circling around: that the things we normally think are fundamental — matter, energy, space, time, observers — might be emergent, not the base layer.
Instead, the base layer is something more abstract:
relations / information / numbers.
This is not numerology, this is more like: the universe is not made out of stuff — it's made out of relations.
What are “Q numbers”?
These are the quantities in quantum theory that describe the possible measurement outcomes, and how they correlate.
They’re things like:
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spin
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charge
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energy levels
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entanglement correlations
These are all quantized — they don’t vary continuously but come in discrete allowed values.
Vedral’s claim is:
The universe is not particles having quantum properties.
The universe is the quantum properties.
He’s reversing the usual picture.
Usually we say:
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“a particle has spin +1/2”
He says:
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“spin +1/2 is primary — the particle is just a useful fiction for this value.”
Why “no observers”?
In the classical Copenhagen-ish understanding of QM, you need an observer to “collapse the wavefunction.”
But in more modern information-theoretic interpretations (like QBism, Rovelli’s relational QM, and parts of the quantum information community), the notion of a metaphysically special observer is dropped.
Vedral is going with that kind of approach:
No mind “collapses” anything.
Correlations evolve.
What we call observing is just becoming entangled.
Why “no space and no time”?
Because in quantum gravity research, space-time is increasingly believed to be emergent from deeper discrete relations — like entanglement networks.
So: space-time is not the stage. It’s a product of the correlations between Q numbers.
(Think of space-time as a derived, large-scale condensation of relational information.)
So what’s the actual vision?
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the universe = a self-evolving network of quantum-number relations
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“objects,” “observers,” “space,” and “time” = higher-scale ways of organizing those relations
This is actually a fairly mainstream line of thought in quantum information foundations, but he states it in a very direct, metaphysical way.
One sentence summary
Vedral is saying:
“Reality is not made of particles in space.
Reality is made of discrete informational relations, and space / time / objects are convenient approximations that emerge from them.”
He’s making the ontology match the math instead of forcing the math to fit the classical ontology.
If you want: I can also spell out where this sits relative to Wheeler’s “it from bit”, Rovelli’s relational QM, and Bousso/Harlow quantum gravity emergent spacetime thinking — because Vedral is pulling from that entire current.
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