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Hi Simon

You asked; “What do you mean by "countless shadow photons???”

I was referring to the many universes interpretation of quantum mechanics. (Everett)

I quote David Deutsch when describing the four-slit experiment in his book The Fabric of Reality.

“What we have inferred so far is only that each tangible photon has an accompanying retinue of shadow photons, and that when a photon passes through one of our four slits shadow photons pass through the other three slits”

These shadow photons are each tangible in other universes lying parallel to our own.

My point was that proper interval locality renders all these parallel universes redundant, as relativistic super-positioning (proper interval locality) of quantum systems explains interference. The proof of this mathematically is relatively easy and is contained in the website.

You next asked; “Is not all this yet another new theory that provides no new explanatory power and just invents new terms that provide neither explanation nor description ?”

I think you addressed this question primarily regarding the statement about the many universes interpretation perhaps you would like to address the question to professor Deutsch.

With regard to proper interval locality I don’t regard it as a new theory but rather the natural marriage of the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and relativity.

Proper interval locality is primarily based on three propositions:

1. To fix an event in the world we need for any inertial reference frame four coordinates, three of space and one of time.
2. The speed of light is constant in all reference frames. This fixes the interval metric
3. The world contains quantum systems that hold energy that can be exchanged between systems. When a quantum system exchanges energy there is has an associated frequency that is proportional to the difference in the total energy of the system before and after exchange.

From there on all I’ve done is remove of the redundancy that has crept in through historic accident. For instance the explanation for the photo-electric effect predates Minkowski space-time by three years. If this had been reversed then twentieth century physics may have taken a very different course.

You then say

“Of course to anything that travels at c in a vacuum there are "zero path intervals". Thats kind of obvious. But take that back to what happening both from our perspective where these paths are not zero, and then to the reality of EM where they are zero, and then see why they match easily if you consider extra dimesnions that are beyond dispute in other areas of maths and physics.”

Have you ever heard of Occam’s Razor

This is the principle that entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.

With respect to the interference, diffraction, entanglement, decoherence these effects can be explained simple and elegantly without the need to invoke higher dimensions.

I think we must get the basics correct particularly the meaning of zero interval paths (Which I don't regard as being kind of obvious) before we go chasing off into higher dimensions we must fully explore the four we can measure

Incidentally, what are these things that travel at c and experience zero interval paths?