Mr. Spock Got It Wrong

Mr. Spock Got It Wrong

The Universe Isn’t a Duck

Mr. Spock, the iconic Vulcan from Star Trek, represents pure logic—cool, calculating, and always rational. But if Spock tried to understand the quantum universe with logic alone, he’d be lost.

One of logic’s favorite tricks is analogy. It’s neat, intuitive, and easy to grasp. Consider the so-called duck test:

“If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck—it must be a duck.”

That might work for ponds and farms. But it doesn’t work for photons.

Light looks like a particle—it hits detectors in discrete chunks. Light also looks like a wave—it creates interference patterns. So classical logic leads to a tidy conclusion: light must be both. Or neither. Or something in between. Pick your paradox.

But this logic fails—not because logic itself is broken, but because the categories are wrong. “Particle” and “wave” are tools from classical thinking. They’re convenient metaphors, not truths. Modern physics—especially quantum field theory—reveals something deeper:

Light is an excitation in a field. So is every so-called particle.

What looks like particle-like or wave-like behavior is actually the result of interactions—between fields, with measurement devices, and through environmental context. The behavior changes based on how we look. The reality underneath doesn’t neatly match the mental boxes we try to fit it in.

And here’s the kicker: this isn’t a flaw in the universe. It’s a flaw in our logic.

We assumed we had the right concepts. We used “if-then” reasoning built on analogies. But reality doesn’t care about analogies. It doesn’t behave like a duck—or a wave—or a particle. It behaves like itself.

Mr. Spock got it wrong.
Logic is a tool—but only when the concepts it manipulates are true to the underlying reality. When they’re not, even the most precise logic leads us astray.

The universe isn’t a duck.
It’s something far stranger—and far more beautiful—than logic alone can ever capture.