Erlkönig: Light Doesn't Move

Let me apologize up front - this is being sketched out in a hurry one evening, it probably still has typos, I haven't drawn the three pictures yet, and I'm not a physicist, but I'm also not one to understimate the value of thought experiments, so, with that in mind, read on.

I'm troubled that everyone keeps talking about spooky action at a distance.

The first reason, of course is that the word distance is being wildly misapplied - we keep talking about the human perception of distance and time, not the photon's.

Let me explain. Let's call it:

The NK Conjecture: Light Doesn't Move †

Here's what I mean, and let's start with the dagger:

• † From the photon's perspective

Because:

• At c, the photon won't experience any passage of time, so
• Travel time is zero to any point in its path, and
• All other points are forever unreachable.
• Therefore all distances are meaningless, because for any possible destination:
  • The photon is already there, or
  • It will never, ever be affected by anything at that location , so
• A photon's entire universe is a zero-dimensional point bounded by a few atoms that interact with it, which are all effectively tangent to the photon simultaneously, in the photon's frame of reference. (and the question of how tangent the atoms themselves are is interesting)
• That zero dimension also excludes time. A photon is both instant and eternal, time has no relevance in its frame of reference.

This tiny subset of spacetime that exists from the photon's perspective is the core concept.

Let's focus on already there, because that means all our drawings are wrong.

We draw this: [apologies for the images not existing yet]

(picture of three distinct locations for emitter, mirror, and target, with the photon's path drawn as a line with an implicit time axis)

But the photon's view is this:

(circle representing a photon's universe, with three arcs representing emitter, mirror, and destination, notably leaving out everything else)

And this reduction-to-point idea doesn't change when we have split a photon into two entangled ones - based on our perception that it's now two photons, because, you know, two discrete locations. But that's our view again, because it's quite possible it's still one photon, which now is affected by additional targets (and the splitter), which would merely appear as additional arcs in the circle below for our photon's view of existence, and would more simply explain how one could send information through entangled photons. I.e.: It's the same photon.

(circle representing a photon's universe, with an 4 arcs representing emitter, mirror, destination 1, splitter, and destination 2)

So the hypothesis is essentially that, from a photon's perspective, it's already everywhere that it has ever been, that split photons aren't entangled, they're just the exact same photon, and that there's nothing spooky about it.

This also means, that in the photon's lifetime, it's as though it's a brief (eternal) spark in which everyplace it travels (exists) is practically in contact with each other.

Testability

Whether this hypothesis is testable is a problem, since there's the whole question about whether the later end of the photon's path affecting the photon breaks entanglement, which would make that avenue useless for testing.