Photons are vastly larger than virtual particles

One of my uncles was an inveterate deer poacher. Perhaps when he was a kid at the turn of the century there was no law governing when the King’s herd could be harvested for meat, and for this reason poaching had less meaning to him than those of another generation. One year in Zion National Park the rangers had there eye on a very large mule eared dear that weighed some 300 lbs. It was something of a pet. My uncle shot the deer in the park and was caught. Fortunately for my uncle, he was well loved by everyone, and as the story goes, they told him that the very least he could have done was to shoot their pet deer outside the park, and after telling him not to do it again, they let him go. If my uncle had been a virtual particle that traveled billions of times faster than light, poaching would have been a snap.

All strings begin as virtual particles that are ejected into space by electrons, photons, and quarks. Electrons not only eject elastic strings into space, they also eject photons, the particles of light that travel at 300 million meters per second. The virtual particle ejected from an electron that is to become an elastic string is vastly smaller than a photon, which allows the electron to eject virtual string particles billions of meters per second faster than it does photons. Kelland—www.vestheory.com