Into the rabbit hole ...

This artist's concept takes a fanciful approach to imagining small primordial black holes. In reality, such tiny black holes would have a difficult time forming the accretion disks that make them visible here.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Photons, Gluons and possibly Gravitons travel at the speed of light as they are massless Bosons, acting either as force carriers which give rise to forces between other particles, or in one case give rise to the phenomenon of mass.  With this in mind, one question to ask is, do they experience time, if not, they can potentially live forever, something akin to the fact reality seems to be a forever construct as well. Another question to ask is, is EPR = EPR, as eloquently proposed by Leonard Susskind & Juan Maldacena, truly equivalent because if so, the emergence of space time from this intrinsic connect shows that space time is not fundamental as the quantum foam would be considered timeless if it consists of wormholes winking in and out of existence based on the size of the wormhole in question, something researchers are now beginning to ask in earnest regarding the possibility of tiny primordial black holes being everywhere, thus potentially giving rise to Dark Matter. 

Stephen Hawking theorized that black holes can slowly shrink as radiation escapes. The slow leak of what’s now known as Hawking radiation would, over time, cause the black hole to simply evaporate. This infographic shows the estimated lifetimes and event horizon –– the point past which infalling objects can’t escape a black hole’s gravitational grip –– diameters for black holes of various small masses. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

The emergence of leptons, hadrons and fermions, driven by the er = epr environment, could also possibly explain how said entities experience time, a characteristic already well known to be true based, in part, to numerous Beta Decay experiments showing how neutrons decay into protons.  In essence, we are but temporary arrangements of the quantum foam. 

"Embedding diagram" of a Schwarzschild wormhole

To this lay physics philosopher to the extreme, this works as this description of reality may finally describe what the quantum jitters truly are as the smaller the worm hole, the shorter the lifetime, constantly winking in and out of existence, as stated before, as needs warrant. This notion also explains why reality is granular if existence consists of wormholes where space is considered an absolute due to the configuration of the wormholes themselves (see above graphic). This take on existence may also include superstrings to the mix as said theory states that reality consists of tiny vibrating strings with differing vibrations giving rise to the three classes of sub atomic particles depicted by the diagram below.

Bosons form one of the two fundamental classes of subatomic particle, the other being fermions. All subatomic particles must be one or the other. A composite particle (hadron) may fall into either class depending on its composition

The analog/digital equation: As seen by the graphic above, reality is digital with analog override.

Existence's also an information appliance to the max. :)

To whit

From John Wheeler (1983), Law Without Law. In: Quantum theory and measurement.

John Wheeler's insightful notion of existence being an information construct (from It to Bit) makes sense as the photon, (boson), the force carrier of the electromagnetic, becomes digital by transitioning from an analog wave into discrete energy packets (quanta) when absorbed by leptons (the electron), a radical solution to the black body problem described in detail by Max Planck in 1900, thus introducing Quantum Mechanics to the world.  Prior to absorption,  photons, aka light, exist as analog waves, something readily seen by Thomas Young's brilliant 1801 double slit experiment.

Seen below are photons, comprised of analog waves, striking a metal plate. When absorbed by the metal plate's electrons, the photons transform into quanta or packets of energy (digital), able to be absorbed by the metal plates's electrons enabling said electrons to be dislodged from the plate. The higher the frequency of light, aka photons, the higher altitude the electrons attain when dislodged from the plate.

The emission of electrons from a metal plate caused by light quanta – photons

As stated before, light's extremely weird. Either analog or digital, depending on its state, photons, the force carrier of the electromagnetic, is an analog wave when traveling in free space but when absorbed by an electron, it becomes digital or a packet of energy i.e. quantum, as it must transform in such a way for it to be properly absorbed by, in this case, an electron. When a electron's energy level drops, the photon emitted reverts back to being an analog wave, which means ... reality is digital with analog override, endlessly switching from one to the other as needs warrant. According to Louis de Broglie, this notion of matter/wave/digital/analog duality applies to all particles, which means reality remains in constant flux, forever driven by the two laws of thermodynamics whereby energy can neither be created or destroyed, only transformed and  ... in a natural thermodynamic process, the sum of the entropies of the interacting thermodynamic systems never decreases. A common corollary of the statement is that heat does not spontaneously pass from a colder body to a warmer body. 

In closing ...

The act of observation generates the collapse of the wave function as described by the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, the physics of the very small, an Alice in Wonderland view of the universe writ large when seen under the guise of exquisitely designed experiments showing how this aspect of reality rings true. What's interesting is the fact the act of observation is often anthropomorphized and not viewed as a core element of how existence functions as everything's entangled and decohered outside of scientific inquiry, thus enabling us rubes to see a consistent view of existence save for the extraordinary experiments conducted by physicists obsessed with how reality works at deep level.

Dividing Line

To be continued as the uncertainty principle rules without question as does incompleteness. :)