transition said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex#Total_Perspective_Vortex
The Total Perspective Vortex is allegedly the most horrible torture device to which a sentient being can be subjected.
“…….When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it there’s a tiny little speck, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, “You are here.”…..”
Located on Frogstar World B, the machine was originally invented by one Trin Tragula in order to annoy his wife. Because she was forever nagging him for having no sense of proportion, he decided to invent something that would show her what having a sense of proportion really meant…..”
You seem to be tapping into where I’m going here. The impression I have developed of how the ‘activation of the underlying quantum field’ that is known as a photon functions is that a photon is for all intents and purposes a point of ‘now’. The property of space energetically is expansion. This contrasted against the timelike properties of a photon implies various factors are integral to the definition of any path through space.
Apart from providing a contrasting ‘here’ to a photon’s ‘now’, the presence of spatial expansion implies that expansion is necessary for the stability of matter within it. This is where the sum of all possible paths becomes more than mathematical measurement of a phenomena and becomes fundamental to stable proliferation of mass and spacetime. A photon traversing static space would not be geometrically coherent. When it traverses expanding space the equations that make up the sum of all possible paths provide a stabilising factor to the shape of ‘now’ and the direction of ‘here’.
The question I would raise would be, is the shape of spacetime and nature of gravity mediated by the cancellation of infinite sets of paths for a particle to find one?