Okay, so, I may have a way of describing the behavior of electrons and photons, within the framework of all this insane nonsense.
Thanks, Timecake, for pointing me at the Feynman lecture, I had forgotten about that.
Now, in my model, an electron, like every other particle, is something like a standing wave in spacetime; it causes spacetime to curve this way and that way. In the big theory, it is infinite, occupying the entire universe, and a measure of its "depth" over distance looks something like sin(ln(x))/x.
However, let us simplify our model a little bit to consider just the interactions of electrons: An electron is a bowl, a curved topology, whose depth is inversely proportional to the distance of a point from the center. For now let's consider the simplified, fake, spin-0 electron, so our bowl is nice and uniform. We're still going to call it infinite, however. Imagine our bowl of distortion in a nice two dimensional plane. "Grab" the center and wiggle it around a bit; relativity applies, so this creates little ripples in our bowl, what I will call an "update wave", which fly away from the center at the speed of light, "telling" everything they encounter where the center of the bowl was when they left; since the center of the bowl didn't move instantaneously from one point to another, but took time to get from one point to another, these ripples will have a measure, a "width"; the faster the bowl moved, the narrower the ripple, and the slower the center of the bowl moved, the wider.
Now, add another bowl, such that the depth of the bowls add together; they're separated a bit, but if you think about the way the bowls add, you should get a little valley connecting the two bowls together. Now, wiggle one of the bowls, and observe the way the ripples wash over the second bowl. These ripples are changes in distance - so the ripples cause the second bowl to move, in turn, relative to the first bowl. From the center of the first bowl's perspective, the second bowl will move, because, for a little bit of time, its distance from the first bowl is changing. Thus they'll begin trading ripples back and forth.
Suppose we wiggle the bowls back and forth, oscillating the center about a point, towards and away from each other, simultaneously (for a given value of simultaneous). Well, consider the ripples; depending on the distance between the centers of the two bowls, the ripples could cancel out, or they could double up - if the ripples of the changed distance arrive just as a bowl is moving one direction, the changed distances could subtract out. If they arrive just as the bowl is moving back in the opposite direction, they could double up.
Add a third bowl, separate from the other two, and observe something: It is moving in the ripples from the motion of both bowls, and also in the secondary ripples, and, in a particular sense, it moves in the secondary ripples regardless of whether or not there actually *are* secondary ripples; they do not truly cancel out, because there is not a "true" value for the distance between anything, once it is in motion.
The absence of a "true" value for the distance is, itself, an absence of a "true" location for the centers of the bowls, which becomes more apparent as you add more bowls - there isn't even a true location for the center of a bowl with respect to the bowl itself.
Now, remember - the bowl is an electron. As should be apparent, the ripples, the update waves, are light. We can extend Feynman's notation for light a little bit, here: The arrow is pointed in the direction the electron was moving at the moment the light left the electron. However, in Feynman's notation, the arrow continues spinning, its frequency of rotation corresponding to the frequency of the light. Our arrow is, in a sense, fixed. What is not fixed, however, is the other electron; the center of the second bowl, which is also oscillating. Relative to the other electron, then, the arrow continues to spin, because the arrow represents the relative distance to the emitting electron, which continues to change.
We're missing some pieces, however - first, these ripples are fundamentally transitory; they do not impart any energy. Second, they are continuous - we do not get quantization out of what I have described. And third, they lack polarization - they lack spin.
Polarization is, in a sense, the easiest to deal with: Spin is relative orientation. I've been talking about electrons that move directly towards and away from each other, and glossed over the issue with the third electron. Electrons have more range of motion than that, and can move, relative to a second electron, side to side - which still represents a change in distance, but a more subtle one. Or just at a random angle. Spin, I believe, reflects the variation in the shape of the ripples, depending on how the electron is oscillating. Remembering, as we consider this oscillation, that the electron is not properly the center, but the entirety of the "bowl", which includes the entire universe. (This requires more explanation than I've written here, because the orientation of an electron in an atom is more constrained than this may suggest.)
Energy, action, arises out of the idea that this entire structure is curvature; these ripples represent a change in distance, and therefore a change in curvature, and therefore an impartation of energy. However, it is only ever partial - the bowl is the entirety of the universe, yet the ripple only covers a small portion of it. The transformations here are messy and ugly, and beg complicated questions about whether or not the bowl structure has some kind of integrity, some force forcing it to cohere into a single shape. (No, there is not a force holding the electron into a particular shape, but almost all ripples are fundamentally transitory in nature, leaving the topology the same as they were when they depart. The exceptions are interesting but out of scope here, concerning the creation or destruction of matter.)
Action, the impartation of energy, is necessarily symmetric; it is not any more correct to say that an electron imparts energy upon another electron, as it is to say that that second electron takes energy from the first electron. It is all a symmetric interaction of topologies, without inherent causal structure.
As the electrons are constantly oscillating, they're constantly emitting and absorbing very small amounts of energy. This oscillation is what we generally think of, when we think of an electron, and these very small amounts of energy being shuffled about - sub-quantum energy - are a large part of what we think of, when we think of an electrical field.
It's light - it's a fluctuation in the electrical field - but it isn't LIGHT, and in particular, we have no mechanism of detecting it. There's a minimum level of energy needed for us to detect light: It's the level of energy necessary to cause an electron to leave an atomic "orbit". This amount of energy causes the electron to move both very quickly, and, given that it will immediately fall into another "orbit", predictably. This much larger chunk of energy is what we call a photon, which goes off in (mostly) two directions, depending on the orientation of the electron when it changed orbits. Remember, however, that there is no causal direction to the topological changes taking place here; this is all symmetric, and universal, and - for a given notion of simultaneity - simultaneous.
Consider a photon hitting an electron - this is a particularly intense ripple interacting with our bowl. Except the photon was emitted from another electron (leaving out other sources of photons for the moment), and both electrons/bowls occupy the entire universe, so the second electron, in a certain perspective, initiated the energy transfer - or, rather, the entire transfer occured acausally, as a result of an interaction between the two electrons, which both occupy the entire universe. The topological changes in the electron which "received" the photon are exactly identical to the topological change of the ripple itself - that is, as far as every other electron is concerned, the only energy that was emitted was from the electron that was hit by the photon, not by the electron that emitted it - and this energy wasn't emitted either, if we keep going.
Why that specific electron, though?
Well, see, that's a matter of interpretation. See, I've been describing the electron as a bowl occupying the entire universe; this bowl represents two things. In quantum mechanics, the "depth" of the bowl at any given point represents the probability distribution. And in general relativity, the "depth" of the bowl at any given point represents the mass-energy distribution - that is, curvature.
Also, the bowl isn't a bowl.
