Resonator Triptych by Eric J. Heller. This and the two images on the following page are parts of a triptych, a sequence in increasing time after the launch of two wavepackets in a potential landscape that is outlined in the dark regions.

Up to now (if you are reading these articles in their original sequence) we have taken the existence of value-indicating events for granted. We had to, for a theory that provides us with nothing but correlations between value-indicating events, presupposes the existence of such events.

Now we are in a position to situate these events within the structure of the theory. The macroworld, which corresponds to What Exists, encompasses the value-indicating events as unpredictable changes in the values of macroscopic positions. These unpredictable changes are not possibilities but facts. They are factual because macroscopic positions (including their unpredictable transitions from one value to another) are factual.

It is often argued that if quantum states evolve deterministically, then at bottom there is no such thing as a fact. While this conditional statement is probably correct, its antecedent is false, not because quantum states "collapse" on occasion, but because they do not evolve at all. Their time-dependence is not the continuous dependence on time of an evolving state of affairs but the dependence of a probability algorithm on the time of the measurement to the possible outcomes of which this algorithm serves to assign probabilities.