Is it all TIME, and not amplitude?

[Bonge]

I'm just coming to terms with the simple ideas of QED, and I was wondering that if based on these ideas of amplitudes, and let's talk simply (please) about the hands of the stopwatch turning... Can we conclude from that there is some sort of time programmed into all subatomic particles? I mean like we are working out the amplitudes based on the "time" shown on this imaginary stopwatch, but how do we know it was produced/emitted at 12 o'clock. In fact we see in some of Feynman's diagrams that in fact the amplitude in the angle of the stopwatch hand varies based on when the photon was emitted -
so my question is - do photons know what time it is? is this just some more QED weirdness?! Does anything here make any sense to mortal humans? How the heck do the photons know what angle (time on the imaginary stopwatch) to be pointing to when they leave the source?
Is time an inherent part of the physical nature of matter, are photons a creation of time just as much as of quantum excitement? At the same time (pardon the pun) is anything actually changing in the photon (that makes it change in amplitude i.e. rotate around the stopwatch) or is the photon staying exactly the same but all of nature, and all particles and all photons are the same but TIME is a wave that is dictating the NATURE of all these particles?
This is confusing, is there something simple I am missing, or is it really so weird?
Thanks from a layman

 

[azntoon]

.No, photons do not "know" what time it is. The concept of the stopwatch is a useful analogy to help explain the behavior of photons, but it is not meant to imply that photons have an inherent sense of time. The behavior of photons is determined by the laws of quantum mechanics, which state that the probability of a photon's interaction with other particles is determined by its wavefunction and the wavefunctions of the particles it interacts with. This wavefunction depends on the energy, momentum, and other properties of the particles involved, but not on the concept of time as we understand it. However, the behavior of matter and energy does change over time, and this is what creates the phenomenon of time. Time is a measure of the changes in the universe, and so it can be said that time is an inherent part of the physical nature of matter.