You know about quantum entanglement. There’s also “time entanglement.” This is where our present conditions are a function of past conditions. Our present-time is “time-entangled” with the past.
Now if you go back in time and change the past, AND assuming that there’s no “many-world” situation where you have multiple timelines, you’re going to change the future.
This “time-entanglement” then ripples through space-time and changes everything.
Can you imagine how much energy this would entail? Practically infinite for a human-level past-changing event. Which is why it never happens.
But for a photon, the ripple from time-traveling may be small enough that it would have a minimal effect, or be swamped by background “noise.”
And there’s another analogy — quantum fluctuations and time fluctuations. Maybe they’re the same thing.
Itr could be that the enormous value of “time-mass” compared to ordinary mass, is that “time-entanglement” is much stickier than quantum entanglement.
In fact, time-mass and time-entanglement may be the same thing.