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 hits a screen as a dot instead. Radio waves are many meters long, 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 then hit twice, but it never does! Physical waves deliver their energy over time and space, but quantum waves deliver all their energy instantly at a point, which is strange. 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.
Current physics can’t explain how any wave could arrive instantly at a point:
“After more than seven decades, no one understands how or even whether the collapse of a probability wave really happens.” (Greene, 2004), p119.
Einstein rejected quantum collapse because it implied faster than light travel, for as he argued:
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 suppose the screen is moved further away, eventually A and B could be in different galaxies, so how can the collapse happen instantly? That two events anywhere in the universe are instantly correlated faster than light contradicts special relativity.
Physical waves can’t collapse instantly but processing can restart in what we call a reboot. For example, when a phone, laptop, or printer reboots, it restarts its processing from scratch. A network node is the same but if it is a client, it will request a processing restart from its server. A reboot then has the following properties:
1. It is irreversible. A reboot can’t be undone because the restart loses all prior processing.
2. It conserves processing. The amount of processing before and after a reboot is the same.
3. It can re-allocate processing. A reboot can allocate the processing involved in new ways.
For example, if you are typing on your phone and it reboots, when it restarts, what you typed before is lost irretrievably unless you saved it because the phone that was letting you type has re-allocated its processing to other tasks. A reboot is then essentially when a processing device restarts from scratch.
A phone will typically reboot itself when it overloads because it ran out of processing while doing something. A network client that has an overload error will do the same, except it will request a processing restart from the server that supports it.
If the quantum network is finite, as proposed here, a network point that overloads will reboot and request a server restart. For example, when a photon wave arrives at screen points that are already fully occupied generating its matter, they will overload and request a server restart. The photon is a wave so many points will reboot at once, all requesting a server restart, but a photon has only one server so only one can succeed. The photon then hits the screen at the point that successfully restarts its server, which to us is random.
In these terms, quantum collapse is a processing wave restart when a network point reboots, and while many screen points can overload, only one can restart the photon. When this happens, instances with no server support just disappear as quantum theory says. Quantum collapse is then the inevitable disbanding of child instances when their parent server begins a new child. The wave collapses as if it never was because its instances have no inherent substance.
Why then doesn’t the reboot point overload again when its processing restarts? The pass-it-on protocol (2.4.4) avoids this, because the point passes on its processing before doing anything else, so the photon that caused the overload has an effect.
To recap, a photon arriving at a screen isn’t a lonely particle heading for one hit point but a wave of many instances, any of which can restart the photon. When a screen blocks this wave, where it restarts depends on which reboot request the server accepts, and that is random for us. Many points may request a restart but only one can succeed, and the first to do so is where the photon hits the screen.
Why then is quantum collapse faster even than light? The speed of light depends on how fast the screen of space passes on the points of a spreading image, but that image can disappear instantly no matter how big it is. For a dot travelling point-to-point across a screen, distance matters, but when a laptop deletes a screen image, every pixel is equidistant. The point-to-point screen speed that defines the speed of light is then irrelevant to the server-client speed, so quantum collapse occurs faster than light because it is a server effect not a client effect.
Physicalism sees quantum collapse as things disappearing, but here they are just client events that didn’t happen. When electrons collide and bounce apart, physicalism sees the same particles before and after, but quantum theory tells another story, that the electrons leaving the collision are actually brand-new creations, fresh off the quantum press. A world of things can just sit there and exist but a world of events must be continually recreated, so matter is constantly annihilated and recreated rather than permanently existing.