Photon Propagation as Microscopic Wave-form Reconstruction: An Ontological Reading of the Photon's Identically-Zero Proper Time, Wheeler-Feynman Absorber Theory, and Feynman Path Integration
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© Copyright 2026 Chen, Ho Yiing (ORCID: 0009-0006-6816-9891), Independent researcher, charenix.com. All rights reserved by the author. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.
I argue that the photon's act of propagation between an emission event A and an absorption event B is best understood not as the flight of a particle through a background spacetime, but as a single microscopic wave-form reconstruction event in which the electromagnetic field configuration is deconstructed at A and reconstructed at B.
The reading is supported by three independently accepted physical facts: (i) the photon's proper time along its null worldline is identically zero; (ii) Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory binds the emission-absorption pair through symmetric retarded and advanced contributions of the electromagnetic field; (iii) the Feynman path integral assigns the propagation amplitude to a phase-coherent superposition over all kinematically permitted paths rather than to any single trajectory.
Under this reading, the constant c is reinterpreted as the coupling constant relating an external observer's spacetime scale to the wave-form reconstruction process, rather than as a particle velocity.
The proposal is situated in relation to the standard textbook picture, Cramer's transactional interpretation, Aharonov's two-state vector formalism, Bohm's pilot wave, and Wheeler's delayed-choice experiments. Empirical status, falsifiability in principle, and implications for the foundational ontology of light are discussed.
The proposal is a conceptual reorganization of accepted quantum-electrodynamic content, not a new physical mechanism; its claim is ontological, not predictive.
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