Our reality may be a sum of all possible realities
I read Feynman's <i>QED</i> back in high school and was fascinated by it, but always had a lingering question.<p>Sure the math works out by summing all possible paths, and then most of them usually cancel each other out, and so you're left with the ones that mostly contribute to the actual probabilities, as complicated as those can still be.<p>But I always suspected... <i>surely</i> that just has to be <i>one</i> mathematical way of looking at it. That at some point we'd discover that turns out to be mathematically identical to something else that would be a bit more local, a bit more intuitive, a bit more straightforward. That never even had to deal in the first place with the infinity of paths that all wind up cancelling each other out anyways.<p>So now that I'm on a forum with smart people, the kind I didn't have access to back in high school... has there been <i>any</i> progress towards something like this at all? Are there any directions for this? Or is there a conceptual reason I'm missing why this fundamentally isn't possible, why the sum of all possible paths is the <i>only</i> way to account for certain behaviors?