Electromagnetism is the general term for what we call light, which is known to be a wave although Einstein found that it is also particle-like. The advantage of space as a surface is that it allows waves to travel upon it. In current physics, light is a transverse wave whose amplitude is said to be imaginary but space as a surface allows light to vibrate into quantum space. A transverse wave needs a surface to vibrate upon so since light can travel in the vacuum of space, it must also be a surface. If a pool top is sealed in concrete, no waves can travel on it because the water can’t move up and down, so if our space is similarly “sealed”, how can light move as a transverse wave? Light as a wave has to vibrate at right angles to its direction in space but it is sequestered from that dimension because a wave cannot leave the surface it vibrates upon.
Imagine a pond of water with waves on its surface – there is the movement of the waves and the movement of the water. The waves move across the surface but the water moves up and down transversely, hence a cork just bobs up and down as a wave passes. What moves horizontally is a pattern of transverse displacements not the water. Likewise, light is a pattern of electromagnetic displacements into quantum space that move in our space. As a light wave can’t travel in the direction of its amplitude, the quantum dimension is indeed “imaginary” to us.
That we are sequestered from the quantum dimension doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. If light waves arise from positive and negative displacements on a surface just as a water wave does, this requires a surface for them to vibrate upon and that surface is our space. The only question is, what moves when light moves? Current physics doesn’t accept that this displacement is real but quantum realism does. It sees light as processing waves spreading a quantum process on a network. It is now proposed that this quantum process is a rotating circle of values at right angles to space, in what from now on is called a transverse circle.
To set a circle of values is efficient because the processing end begins another cycle. If quantum processing is like our processing, there are no half-cycles so a cycle must complete once begun. When this quantum process runs in one node, equal positive and negative displacements in the same cycle cancel out to give space. The same processing distributed over more nodes gives the wave pattern of light (Figure 2.7) as the next chapter explains.
If light waves are processing waves, the process is a rotation into an unseen dimension, exactly as the complex numbers that explain it assume. Schrödinger’s equation describes an electron as a three-dimensional wave whose value at any point is set in an imaginary dimension. He called it a matter density wave because high values make matter more likely to exist there, but quantum waves act nothing like matter. Born called it a probability wave because its amplitude squared is the probability an entity exists there, but a probability is just a number. We expected the ultimate formula of reality to be physical but it isn’t. The quantum waves that predict physical events aren’t based on mass, momentum, velocity or any other physical property.
That the unreal creates the real makes no sense to physical realism but physicists who use complex numbers to predict physical events implicitly accept this. They also accept that an electron is a wave and a particle, that space is discrete in quantum theory and continuous in field theory, that the universe began at a big bang and is complete, and so on, until they call logic “philosophy” and give up on it. Quantum realism concludes that light is a quantum processing wave setting circular displacements transverse to the surface of our three-dimensional space.