The Wave-Particle Dualism of Photons as Seen from an Informational Perspective

The paper deals with J. A. Wheeler´s proposal 1 that each piece of reality owes its existence due to observation - an approach to physics which implies that all physical entities at their bottom are informational in character. Focusing on the double-slit experiment with photons, which is the key evidence for the wave-particle dualism of photons, the paper follows Wheeler´s observational approach and interprets this experiment as a question posed to nature. Considering how the enquiry regarding the wave-particle duality of photons is answered by nature, it is shown that experimental questions are being answered by nature in the form of spatiotemporal patterns of elementary observations (EOs) which are binary pieces of information, produced by the dissipation of energy. Working through this line of thought, Wheeler´s statements of “binary information gain”, “observer participance”, and the “impossibility of continuum idealizations of physical laws” are elucidated and connections to the Landauer Principle being made. It is further shown that the wave-particle dualism of photons involves a dilemma of incompatible forms of existence, a problem which can be resolved by a discontinuous form of photon propagation in which photons repeatedly materialize and annihilate while being forward-shifted in space by finite distances equivalent to half the photon wavelength.