Recent searches
Search options
Been thinking about physics and the speed of light. It occurs to me that the speed of light isn't really the speed of light.
That needs some unpacking. If special relativity holds, and we have every reason to believe that it does, then nothing, no signal or force of any kind, can go any faster than that. That means it isn't the speed of light per se, but rather the speed at which the universe propagates events.
Within that conceptual framework, light doesn't have a speed at all. It just instantly arrives. What we can measure is how long it takes the *instant the light was emitted* to arrive.
Which is no different in practical terms from light having a speed, but it's still cool to think about.
@Querral doesn't this fail to account for quantum mechanics by conflating the propagation of a photon's waveform with both a world-line and the instant transmission of information?
Also, while entanglement experiments are insofar somewhat limited (to my knowledge), we have shown that the spin change in an entangled pair does not abide by the limits imposed by special relativity but rather by the conservation of that information, so the world-line of the two events would appear analogous, thus appearing to violate causality despite preventing duplication.