In current physics, a photon is a massless particle that sometimes acts like a wave, but how it can be a wave at one moment and a particle the next isn’t explained. A photon is called a particle because it hits a screen like a particle, not a wave. Yet while how a photon arrives at a screen is known, how it traveled is just an assumption tacked onto the facts, as knowing how an entity arrives isn’t the same as knowing how it travels. According to quantum theory, a photon travels as a wave but then collapses into a particle when it hits the screen. Its critics couldn’t fault this logic, because it has no fault, as it describes the evidence, but particle physics can’t explain it, so it calls it imaginary.
In contrast, this model argues that quantum theory correctly describes a photon process spreading on a network, whose instances spread like a wave but still restart at a point like a particle. The process restart destroys the spreading instances instantly, so quantum collapse really happens, and this makes quantum theory real not imaginary.
But if a photon is a cloud of instances that go through two slits at once, which one is the photon? The question betrays a particle bias, that a photon is a thing in one place, but according to quantum theory, it isn’t. To say that a photon has wave function is then just the stubborn illusion that it is a thing, with a wave property, which is impossible. In this model, a photon doesn’t have a wave function, it is the wave function, or more exactly, the process that generates it.
This approach doesn’t challenge the evidence, but how current physics interprets it. It suggests that a photon is never a particle, even when it hits a screen, but a processing wave that dilutes as it spreads but still restarts at a point, just as quantum theory says. What exists then is neither quantum states nor physical states, as both come and go, but a process that never stops and so is, in our terms, immortal. That light is immortal in a space that always abides is then a fundamental fact of our universe. If as Shakespeare said, “all the world’s a stage”, then classical mechanics describes the stage but quantum mechanics describes what happens backstage.
The next section explores how a processing wave can travel like a wave but arrive like a particle.