Roy,
That's why I keep going back to the point about time going both directions. When we look at it from the subjective perspective of the node, it is a series of events, but but if we look at it as these "configurations states" going future to past, it is the direction of the entire field.
amrit,
Is the continuum only a function of interaction on the Planck scale?
Here is a link to the Carver Mead American Spectator interview;
http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/People/CarverMead.htm
"So early on you knew that electrons were real.
The electrons were real, the voltages were real, the phase of the sine-wave was real, the current was real. These were real things. They were just as real as the water going down through the pipes. You listen to the technology, and you know that these things are totally real, and totally intuitive.
But they're also waves, right? Then what are they waving in?
It's interesting, isn't it? That has hung people up ever since the time of Clerk Maxwell, and it's the missing piece of intuition that we need to develop in young people. The electron isn't the disturbance of something else. It is its own thing. The electron is the thing that's wiggling, and the wave is the electron. It is its own medium. You don't need something for it to be in, because if you did it would be buffeted about and all messed up. So the only pure way to have a wave is for it to be its own medium. The electron isn't something that has a fixed physical shape. Waves propagate outwards, and they can be large or small. That's what waves do.
So how big is an electron?
It expands to fit the container it's in. That may be a positive charge that's attracting it--a hydrogen atom--or the walls of a conductor. A piece of wire is a container for electrons. They simply fill out the piece of wire. That's what all waves do. If you try to gather them into a smaller space, the energy level goes up. That's what these Copenhagen guys call the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. But there's nothing uncertain about it. It's just a property of waves. Confine them, and you have more wavelengths in a given space, and that means a higher frequency and higher energy. But a quantum wave also tends to go to the state of lowest energy, so it will expand as long as you let it. You can make an electron that's ten feet across, there's no problem with that. It's its own medium, right? And it gets to be less and less dense as you let it expand. People regularly do experiments with neutrons that are a foot across.
A ten-foot electron! Amazing
It could be a mile. The electrons in my superconducting magnet are that long.
A mile-long electron! That alters our picture of the world--most people's minds think about atoms as tiny solar systems.
Right, that's what I was brought up on-this little grain of something. Now it's true that if you take a proton and you put it together with an electron, you get something that we call a hydrogen atom. But what that is, in fact, is a self-consistent solution of the two waves interacting with each other. They want to be close together because one's positive and the other is negative, and when they get closer that makes the energy lower. But if they get too close they wiggle too much and that makes the energy higher. So there's a place where they are just right, and that's what determines the size of the hydrogen atom. And that optimum is a self-consistent solution of the Schrodinger equation."
So what if light expands as a field, like the electrons he is describing and only collapses into photons when we measure it. It would not only be a function of the light, but a process of interaction with the measuring device. It might explain lots of things, such as action at a distance, as the entangled particles are fronts of the same wave. Possibly cosmic redshift as well, since the wave front has to expand the greater its radius, so redshift becomes a consequence of distance, not recession velocity.
