Here is the one idea the whole account turns on. In the Force of Time, light is a flow of Τ — the single substance of which everything is made — running along a carrier. The carrier is a chain of nodes: stable, repeating knots in the fabric of time, spaced exactly one wavelength apart. The photon is the Τ that moves through that chain. It is not one of the nodes. It is the flow itself.
Why does this matter at the slits? A node is local — it sits at one address. But a flow is extended: it is not at a point, it is spread along the carrier. And an extended thing arriving at a barrier with two openings does the most ordinary thing in the world — it goes through both. No splitting, no copying, no photon in two places at once. One flow, wide enough to cover both slits, simply passes through both, the way a wide river reaching two channels in a weir runs down both at the same moment without tearing the water in half.
Mark the boundary: the electron is a fixed node; the photon is the flow. The "fixed node, moving spacetime" picture belongs to the electron and is treated in its companion. This paper is the flow.
In the Force of Time a prism is a device that re-emits Τ-flow: it receives the carrier on one side and launches it afresh on the other, sorted by wavelength. A narrow slit does the same. Each slit acts as a second prism — it takes the incoming flow and re-emits it as a fresh, spreading carrier of its own. Beyond the barrier there are now two fresh carriers, one from each slit, overlapping as they travel to the screen, and perfectly in step at birth because they came from one source.
Pick any point on the screen. The flow from slit one travelled a distance r₁ to reach it; the flow from slit two travelled r₂. Since the carrier is a chain of nodes spaced one wavelength apart, the path difference r₂ − r₁ is simply a count of nodes. A whole number of wavelengths and the two flows arrive in step — crest meeting crest — and reinforce: a bright band. A whole number plus a half and they arrive opposed — crest meeting trough — and cancel: a dark gap. Nothing needed a wave that is also a particle; only a flow, a carrier of nodes, and arithmetic.
A picture earns nothing until it gives the right number. The textbook writes the intensity down by appeal to wave mechanics; the Force of Time builds it from two plain properties of the one substance, so a hostile reader can see nothing is hidden.
Principle one — flows add. Τ is a single substance; when two flows meet at a point they add into one running total. Tag each with a phase. Take the flow from slit one as the reference unit, 1; the flow from slit two arrives early or late by the extra distance it travelled, so write it 1 carried round by that timing, eiφ, with the phase set directly by the node-count difference. Principle two — brightness is the square of the flow. The brightness we see is the Τ deposited on the screen, and deposited Τ goes as the square of the total local flow — the same rule by which energy laid down by a flow scales as the flow squared everywhere in the Force of Time.
Read what this says. When the path difference is a whole number of nodes the cosine is one and I = 4: the band is four times the brightness of a single flow — not two, because the flows reinforced before they were squared. When the difference is a half the cosine is zero and I = 0: total darkness. The bands fade toward the edges because each slit has width a, so its own re-emitted flow partly cancels against itself — the single-slit envelope sinc²(πa y/λL). The two-slit reinforcement rides inside that envelope. It is exactly the formula the textbook prints, derived here with no wave-particle duality anywhere.
Light is a flow of Τ running along a carrier — a chain of nodes spaced one wavelength apart. The photon is the Τ moving through the chain, never one of the nodes. A node is local; a flow is extended. This single distinction carries the whole explanation.
Each slit re-emits the incoming carrier as a fresh, spreading flow of its own. Because the original flow is extended it reaches both slits; both re-emit; two overlapping flows travel on to the screen, in step at birth. Nothing splits — one flow passes through both prisms.
Path difference r₂ − r₁ is a count of nodes. A whole number reinforces (bright); a whole number plus a half cancels (dark). Band spacing is Δy = λL/d, and the number of bands under the central dome is the pure ratio 2d/a — carrying no colour at all.
Τ is one substance, so two flows at a point add into one total: 1 + eiφ, with phase φ = 2π(r₂ − r₁)/λ set by the node count. Superposition is owned here as a property of the substance, not imported from wave mechanics.
Deposited Τ goes as the square of the total flow: I = |1 + eiφ|² = 4cos²(φ/2). Bright bands reach 4, not 2, because the flows reinforced before being squared. Dark gaps reach 0. Every band now has a precise height.
The two-slit reinforcement rides inside the single-slit envelope set by slit width a: I(y) = cos²(πd y/λL)·sinc²(πa y/λL). The same formula the textbook prints — derived from two owned principles and one line of algebra, with no duality.
The Τ forbidden from the dark gaps is not lost — it is piled into the bright bands. Averaged over the pattern, 4cos²(φ/2) has mean 2 = 1 + 1: exactly the Τ the two flows brought in. Not a scrap is gained or lost.
A lone photon is one extended flow, wide enough to reach both slits, so even alone it is re-emitted by both and overlaps with itself. It lands at one address with the odds the intensity sets. Which-path detection removes one of the two flows — and the bands vanish. No paradox, no conscious observer.
A radial speed-law grows as λ and an orbital speed-law grows as λ²; they can agree at one wavelength only — 486 (Hβ), the light-equalisation point, where both equal the speed conventional optics calls c. Only a flow, not a fixed node, can carry a speed set by its own wavelength.
One result here departs sharply from standard optics, and it is the kind of clean, checkable claim a sceptical reader should want. In conventional physics every colour of light travels through empty space at one single speed, c. In the Force of Time each colour band carries its own speed, fixed by its wavelength — and the single shared speed of textbook optics is only the one wavelength where two different speed-laws happen to cross.
One law climbs as λ, the other as λ², so they agree at one wavelength only: 486 — the Hβ line, the light-equalisation point. There both speeds equal 299,789,233.68308926 m/s, the speed conventional optics calls c, sitting just 10.755 ppm below the SI figure because the metre is pegged at a neighbouring register. This is the optical twin of something the Force of Time finds throughout nature: a special shell where a radial law and an orbital law equalise and all distortion vanishes — the same structure as the no-distortion depth inside the Earth. For light, that shell is a wavelength.
The point is not that the textbook mathematics is wrong — it is superbly accurate — but that each established picture stops at a name where the Force of Time supplies a mechanism. Copenhagen calls the photon a probability amplitude that "collapses" when measured, and forbids you to ask what is physically there between emission and detection; the Force of Time explains the bands with a real flow, through two real prisms, depositing real Τ. Many-worlds keeps the mathematics and pays with an infinity of unobservable universes; the Force of Time needs one world and one substance. Pilot-wave theory comes closest in spirit — a real particle guided by a real wave — but carries two ingredients where the Force of Time carries one: the flow is the wave, and the landing is the flow closing. The walking-droplet experiments, a bouncing oil drop guided by its own surface wave, are a vivid laboratory echo of exactly this — one substance, both wave and walker.