Through the looking glass.

Photons are the gauge bosons for the electromagnetic interaction, but there are other force carriers for other interactions out there. They're the basic building blocks that hold up our universe and give us information about it.

We see photons as energy transfers between two points, propagating at c through space (being emitted somewhere and arriving somewhere else some time later). But from their own point of view, they're not going anywhere nor taking any time to arrive there. For carriers, emission point blends instantly with detection point as they pop up into existence.

But does this sound familiar? Something that connects two distant spacetime points in no time… A wormhole!

Yes, quanta travelling at c are more or less like wormholes in our universe. Any photon that pops up into reality experiences all its history at once, while it seemed to be travelling through vacuum for others. Both points of view only agree after the fact, so detection point is the only common link for carriers and observers. In a sense, detection point is where/when all photon's history takes place.

So we should picture photons as “spread” (somehow) through the spacetime we perceived between emission and detection. This doesn't mean photons have predictive superpowers or that our actions are predestined, just that we see the same events and interactions from wildly different perspectives.

The way we see events taking place is so different to their own perspective that any physical path we imagine makes no sense for them: paths, shortcuts, bifurcations and choices have no meaning when you go at c, because life feels spaceless and instantaneous at that speed.

Imagine you compress a spring instead of folding paper to illustrate how wormholes work. You see? You don't need extra dimensions to connect spacetime points together; things going at c do the same trick all the time! Any energy quantum traversing the universe right now is doing just that. Amazing, isn't it?

Yet, this bubbling sea of photons and force carriers is what defines our reality. They don't experience much of the universe, but they create it for us, shaping our notions of space and time. Carriers are like tiny random brush strokes on an expressionist painting: We are the ones that can make sense of the big picture, because they are meaningless one by one.

So we are lucky we move below the speed of light, because that's the only way we can collect information and know about the universe!