Bubbles

Idea: Bubbles
Conjecture: 85%

The double-slit experiment with single photons seems to suggest that a photon interacts with its surroundings over an area, not just as a single point (or particle).  Rather than traveling in a straight line from source to destination, a photon behaves like a wave that "travels" through all the possible points that photon could travel through.

I imagine photons "moving" as bubbles that expand at the speed of light.  Where these bubbles intersect, events or interactions can occur.  The photon can hit a screen or otherwise be detected.  I imagine reality consisting of a huge number of bubbles, expanding, colliding, and popping.

If these bubbles represent the possibility of any event occurring, and there is a set speed at which bubbles expand (c), then this immediately makes c the speed limit for everything... particles, information, energy, whatever.  No matter could exceed c because it would have to "leave its bubble behind", like a sonic boom, and then it couldn't interact with anything ahead of its bubble.  It couldn't be seen or felt... basically it wouldn't be there.  If what things "are" are these bubbles, then by definition nothing could travel faster than the bubbles expand.

If "bubble expansion rate" determines everything, then light doesn't move in a classical sense, with a velocity that determines its change in distance over time.  Everything would be determined by these bubbles.  So, time itself would be defined by the behavior of the bubbles.  c isn't so much a speed of something, but the maximum rate at which anything in the universe happens.  Likely, distance too would be defined by the behavior of the bubbles.

At the very least, it seems right that c is more than just a cosmic speed limit.  It seems right that time and distances are some consequence of c, and not the other way around, because in the classical sense of things, there is no good reason why there would be a speed limit at all.

This may be more important than the bubble idea, so I'll repeat it: It seems reasonable that time is defined by the speed of light.  It is the rate at which information travels, and so it defines the rate at which particles can interact.

...

Unfortunately, the bubble idea fails in several ways.  First, the bubble should "pop" when it interacts with the slits.  To get around this, I imagined a single "point" on the bubble, which represents a single possible point of interaction.  This point can move freely across the bubble, moving like the probability of the point being at that particular place and time.  So the point can slide through the slits.  The bubble becomes as small as the slit, and continues expanding from there (just like blowing a soap bubble through a multiple layers of plastic mesh).

Secondly, the destructive interference patterns seen in the double-slit experiment don't represent probability waves interfering with themselves at exactly the same time (which would be constructive interference), but at slightly offset times (with opposite phases in wave-like propagation of light).  This means that the spherical surface of a bubble would interact either with an interior part of the bubble's area (as in a solid sphere rather than a 2D surface), or it would interact with itself in multiple different times.

At this point the idea becomes too abstract and unreal to try to figure out.