Jim, you ask the question, what if the electron is virtual rather than real?
My paper takes on this issue, and mostly says "yes" but to give a satisfactory answer we actually refine a great deal of the terminology and introduce some very new concepts. (Well, not "very" new as these concepts are strongly related to Leibniz's "monad".)
Basically, we have this:
agentE1
agentP1
agentE2
We have three agents in our little model. These are not particles. These are not waves. They are just some hypothetical agents of a model that don't actually correspond to anything that exists in reality.
Their positions and momentums are known with full certainty in the model.
E1 emits P1 and P1 is abosrbed by E2.
We will say E1 is contained in a larger configuration of agents, as is E2. When the interaction occurs information is transmitted about E1 to E2. This information is not all of the possible information about E1, it is simply the information relayed by P1.
This information about E1 is the electron. It is what we call real. The information relayed to E2 about E1 is not exactly equal to E1 itself. As an analogy, when you observe a coffee mug, you do not observe the entire essence of the mug, just a fraction of it. Same here.
The information about E1 is incomplete, and were we to attempt to gain more information about E1 we would not get certain information about a single state of E1, as every interaction with E1 changes its state slightly.
We see here that E1 is some certain object in a determinate model, but when information about E1 is relayed by other agents in the model the result is incomlete information that we have called the electron.
This is how electrons (and photons and all other matter) have show a wave-particle duality, and this is how the Uncertainty Principle arises in nature.
So, to answer your question, is the electron virtual?
We will restate this question as multiple questions:
1. Is the electron "real"?
Sure
2. Is there something virtual about the electron, however?
Yes.
First, the electron is only "real" because it is a set of information we have gathered from our interaction in nature and we have called this information "the electron." The same goes for a photon. Noone's "seen" a photon in the way they would expect to see it, though we have all seen effects of light. The click of a photomultiplier, the brightness of a star, the thermal radiation. These effects we have collectively grouped information of into a single entity and named it "the photon"
Second, the electron may be "real" but its existence appears to depend on a hypothetical agent in the universe that is not "real".
There is plenty more to say on this. For example, if the larger configuration of E2 has some analytical capabilitiy there are consequences of the interaction. The configuration may make the following analysi:
1. I interacted with something else
2. This something else exists at a distance from me
3. I changed state
More interestingly we can describe these analysis as:
1. There is Matter
2. There is Space
3. There is Time
This is how these three concepts manifest themselves in the information we call nature.
This interpretation of the absorbtion and emission of force carrying particles (whether it is the photon, graviton, or nuclear bosons isn't too important) is consistent with QM in a strangely intuitive way, and it is consistent with nearly all of Relativity though it can be shown to eliminate the need for Relativity on a theoretical basis.
Again, this is all written up with plenty of detail in my paper:
www.techmocracy.net/science/time.htm
mhelland@techmocracy.net
