If a photon is a spread-out wave, as quantum theory says, how can it arrive at a point? A wave should hit a barrier as a smear but a photon hitting a screen gives a dot instead. Radio waves are many meters long and so should take time to arrive, even at light speed, but they don’t. If they did, in the delay between a wave front’s first hit and the rest arriving, the tail could hit something else. One photon could hit twice which it never does! A physical wave delivers its energy of its entire wavelength so how does a quantum wave deliver all its energy instantly at a point? As Walker says:
“How can electromagnetic energy spread out like a wave … still be deposited all in one neat package when the light is absorbed?” (Walker, 2000) p43
The fact is that physics doesn’t know how a quantum wave collapses to a point in a physical event:
“After more than seven decades, no one understands how or even whether the collapse of a probability wave really happens.” (Greene, 2004), p119
Einstein didn’t like quantum collapse because it implied faster than light travel. He argued that if a photon is a wave that spreads as quantum theory says:
Before the photon hits a screen, its wave function exists at points A or B with some probability but after it is entirely at point A say not at B. The moment A “knows” it is the photon then B “knows” it isn’t. Now as the screen moves further away, eventually A and B could be in different galaxies but if the collapse is immediate, how can this be? That two events anywhere in the universe are instantly coordinated faster than light contradicts special relativity.
In quantum theory, quantum waves are waves that spread to any size then collapse to a point when observed. Nothing physical can do this but processing spreading on a network can overload a node, giving reboot that:
1. Is irreversible. A reboot can’t be reversed.
2. Conserves processing. The processing before and after a reboot is the same.
3. Allows change. A reboot can re-allocate processing in potentially new ways.
When a photon wave arrives at a screen, the extra processing is expected to overload nodes that are already maximally occupied with the screen matter. This will restart the photon server supporting the quantum wave. If many nodes reboot, the first to access the photon server will succeed. If a parent server maintaining many child instances restarts for one node, it will immediately stop supporting all other instances, so they “disappear”. The collapse of the quantum wave function is then just the inevitable disbanding of child instances when a server process restarts. A quantum wave of any size can instantly disappear, as if it never was, because it is a wave of processing instances, not a “thing”.
When a photon hits a detector screen, what arrives isn’t a lonely particle looking for a point to hit but a cloud of instances requesting action from nodes already busy with screen matter. When a screen node overloads, it requests the server to restart the process, and since one photon has only one server, only one such request can succeed. The first node to successfully request a server restart is where the entire photon restarts and that point becomes where the photon “hits” the screen.
How can a quantum wave that could spread over a galaxy instantly collapse to a point in it? When our computers change a screen point, the program doesn’t “go to” the screen pixel to change it. It can change any screen point directly and likewise a quantum server is directly linked to nodes anywhere on the screen of space. The node-to-node transfer rate that defines the speed of light is irrelevant to the server-client link that governs quantum collapse. If the quantum wave is a processing wave, what troubled Einstein, that quantum collapse is instant regardless of distance, isn’t a problem.
Seeing quantum entities as processing not material things changes everything. When two electrons collide and bounce apart, we assume that what leaves the collision is the same matter that entered it, but if the “collision” is a node overload and server restart, the “particles” that leave are actually brand-new creations just off the quantum press. The conservation of processing in the reboot maintains the illusion that a matter “substance” continues to exist but physical events annihilate and create quantum entities just as quantum theory says.