Melvin Vopson published a paper about a theory that attributes dark matter as information. As a kind of bit philosophical person I have been playing with this kind of thought experiment. (Later I discovered this was also published, which is highly relevant: https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-time-really-flow-new-clues-come-from-a-century-old-approach-to-math-20200407)
If all particles with mass are nodes in a network of the Universe, then we could say, that photons and time actually do not exist the way we perceive them!
One way to explain photons is that they are energy packages that transfer small amounts of energy between particles. We could think that there is a deterministic ledger of all links / energy transfers between all particles in the Universe. So in a sense, even if we would aim a laser beam to something and capture it mid-way, the ledger would had known that no matter what we do.
The ledger thus has rows of node A, node B and the amount of energy transferred.
Nodes are not represented by “identity” but instead by coordinates in timespace; the energy of the photon will reach it’s destination in that direction and that many light years away. So in a sense node B would actually be a direction from an origin and each node A would have a different origin. BigBang in this notation would be (0, 0, 0, 0) and the second particle ever manifested would be (X, Y, Z, t 0+1), t 0 + 1 meaning “the next iteration / row of the ledger”.
Then we do this funny trick.
If the ledger is truly deterministic it has to contain all the photons that will ever exist during the entire history of our Universe; (t > now).
From there we can build the idea of what happens if some matter doesn’t seem to be “getting there in time” or “rounding errors” or “oh shit, this package is on it’s way but you guys are not yet there to receive it, hurry up!” or “god damn, the post office lost my mail again… oh wait, here it is!”, meaning that this knowledge of what will happen would have to have a physical existence in the Universe as dark matter and dark energy, which pushes particles around towards where they are supposed to be in future. At least from the perspective of the ledger.
If we think particles and photons as a network of nodes and links, the energy that has left a particle has to always reach some particle in future; a photon can not escape the Universe because that would break the energy preservation law, thus we can consider that dark matter and dark energy could indeed be related on the information about where the photon is going and where we have to “catch” it.
Also, I like this thought experiment, because it gives us a nice complex network theory version of BigBang. According to that theory, the red shift of photons could be explained as difference of the fractal dimensionality of the network from timespace coordinate A to B, maybe, I am not a phsycisian.
