Quantum computing has trouble scaling because it forgot Quantum Mechanics : Resonance, Complementarity, and the incomplete design stack

Quantum computing has made extraordinary experimental progress over the past three decades, yet the gap between laboratory demonstrations and scalable, fault-tolerant computation is not closing at the rate the underlying physics should allow. This essay argues that the scaling difficulties are not primarily engineering failures but consequences of an architectural misalignment : the computational model on which quantum processors are built abstracts away the very features that define quantum mechanics at its foundations. Specifically, the observer-system interaction has been removed from the design, measurement has been reduced to a classical readout event, and complementarity has been treated as a philosophical footnote rather than an operational constraint. Drawing on Bell's theorem, Bohr's complementarity principle, von Neumann's measurement formalism, and recent work on interaction-dependent tensor product structures, the essay identifies the structural variables that the current paradigm omits and proposes that quantum processors designed around resonance coupling, phase-locking measurement, and complementarity-aware geometry should exhibit improved scaling properties. The analysis connects to the 2025 Nobel Prize recognition of macroscopic quantum tunneling in superconducting circuits, arguing that the Nobel-recognized physics is already resonance-based while the computing architecture built on top of it is not. The claim is narrow and testable : if interaction defines the quantum system rather than disturbing it, and if complementarity constrains what can be coherently accessed, then processors built to respect these features should outperform those that do not.