The Answer to Zeilinger’s “Very Fundamental Question”: QR/TOPI

From the author’s abstract

In Felix’s words

In the 1990s, Anton Zeilinger, a superb experimentalist “trying to understand Nature”, endeavored to elevate information to “a foundational principle for quantum mechanics”. Three decades later, upon earning the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics with Alain Aspect and John F. Clauser, Zeilinger inspired me to select this article’s name after saying: “The very fundamental question — what does this really mean in a basic way? — is unanswered and is an avenue for new research.” Albeit visibly not content with his “foundational principle”, he still stated during his Nobel lecture: “Maybe, we need a Unification between the Concepts of Reality and Information”. I agree with Zeilinger against ‘many-worlds’ but utterly disagree with his vision of Information as a “foundational principle” for a theory about the physical world. QR/TOPI integrates Quantum Theory (QT) with Special Relativity (RT) by modifying their Ontology, Foundation, Structure, and Interpretation. QR/TOPI shows RT is not the ultimate account of spacetime structure, provides the “radical conceptual renewal” requested by John Bell, and answers the “very fundamental question” posed by Zeilinger. Zeilinger’s ‘Total Information Content’ is shown to be a derivative of the notion of State. Ergo, it cannot be deemed foundational. Zeilinger’s “fundamental question” is answered by reviewing several experimental epitomes of quantum ‘quirkiness’, whose physical meanings proposed to date - if not stranger than the phenomena themselves - are incoherent and overly contrived. Explanatory catchphrases like ‘wave-particle duality’, ‘interaction-free detection’, ‘availability of path-information’, ‘retrocausality’, ‘erasing the past’, ‘changing the path of a photon millions of years ago’, etc. are proven wrong.

This is an excerpt for orientation. Read the linked PDF for the complete abstract, argument, references, and revision context.