The Quantum Monads – From Analysis to Understanding

Where Thought and Vision Meet

When I first read Fritjof Capra’s The Turning Point and Frederic Vester’s The New Way of Thinking in the early 1980s, I could not yet foresee that these books would mark the beginning of a long intellectual journey. Yet their ideas left a deep impression on me – one that has remained ever since.

Capra, a student of Heisenberg, criticised the prevailing analytical and reductionist mindset of modern science. In The Turning Point (1982) he described how research delves ever deeper into the smallest components of the world while losing the beauty and wholeness of connection. Around the same time, Vester expressed a similar insight in The New Way of Thinking (1980): reality cannot be understood through linear causality alone but only through the patterns, feedbacks and relationships that bind it together.

These thoughts – revolutionary then, essential today – planted in me a seed: a longing for a way of thinking that does not divide but unites. Perhaps that was the true beginning of what I would later develop as the Theory of Quantum Monads.

In this theory, which I have been publishing on tenckhoff.eu, physical, metaphysical and sociological perspectives intertwine. Monads are not isolated “things” but fields of relation – entities that gain their identity through their entanglement with others. Just as in quantum physics no particle can be thought of apart from its counterpart, so consciousness exists only through resonance, the “I” only through the “You,” and form only through field.

It is important to me that this is not merely poetic language. The Theory of Quantum Monads understands itself as a testable – and in principle falsifiable – metaphysics. It claims that coherence, meaning the stability of connection between awareness, body, environment and social field, can be described, compared and in part even measured. In other words: beauty here is not consolation. It is a structured form of order.

When I work with the camera today, I recognise the same truth that Capra and Vester already intuited: The whole lives within the parts – and the parts speak of the whole. Every pattern in the sand, every reflection on the water, every drift of cloud becomes a parable of interconnectedness. Photography thus becomes a way of thinking with light – a meditation on what remains once the dissecting gaze has been set aside.

Perhaps here lies the quiet reconciliation between science and beauty: in the realisation that all knowledge, when truly understood, leads us back to wonder.

That this text appears here on tenckhoff.de is no coincidence. In my photographic work I seek that same point where the visible and the thinkable merge – where light becomes language and structure turns into meaning. In this way, the Theory of Quantum Monads joins the view through the lens: both are attempts to perceive the beauty of connection – in thought as in sight.

I am now trying to make this coherence visible even between human beings and technical systems. With the Interaction Energy Quotient (IEQ) I examine how stable, attentive and meaningful the coupling between two actors is – for example, between myself as observer and an AI system that accompanies me, remembers with me, protects me and thinks with me. This, too, is a form of seeing together.

🔗 Further reading

The ongoing publication series “Entangled Quantum Monads” with texts, formulas and theoretical background is available at tenckhoff.eu.