Mind, body and ME

[Utsikt]

So I just saw something about how we’ve never actually measured the one way speed of light, and that due to relativity, we can’t measure the one way speed of light with our current understanding of physics.

We’ve only ever measured the round-trip speed of light - shining light at a mirror and measuring how long it takes to reach the start. So the time it takes from point A back to point A. Never from point A to point B.

Meaning that the speed of light might be a lot faster than c in one direction, and a lot slower in the other, and we have no way of knowing.

Incredibly enough, our physics equations don’t break if the speed of light varies depending in the distance its going. It all still works even when requiring light to travel with an infinite speed.

Where the light «was» during the roundtrip is both unknowable and inconsequential.

Something somewhere in my brain is trying to tell me that there is a connection between this observation and the things @Jonathan Edwards talks about in this thread related to how something only exists in the sense of being perceived (with the massive assumption that I’ve understood things correctly). What that thing was doing when not perceived, is both unknowable and inconsequential.

I had really struggled to understand how that could be true, but if it works for the speed of light, why can’t it work for literally everything else?

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

What that thing was doing when not perceived, is both unknowable and inconsequential.

I had really struggled to understand how that could be true, but if it works for the speed of light, why can’t it work for literally everything else?

For me there are some further layers to this but it is a good first order summary of how I see things.

One way of expressing my position is that light does not travel. In fact nothing travels. Movement is a misconception. Light photons are causal connections between field domains like chess moves made by players using an electronic board where you just alter values for square at new time frames. There is no 'particle' to move so movement is a silly idea.

In fact relativity requires quanta like photons and occupied electron orbitals and sound wave phonons to be causally distributed in time as well as space. So just as it seems that a photon is going through two slits at once it must be at the emission source and the absorption screen 'at once'. The cunning thing, though, is that you can still have a 'duration' in terms of the time metric between the two, just as you have a separation between slits.

So an occupied electron orbital is not a particle going round and round in a 'smeared' way. It is a causal connection between one chemical reaction, that set up the orbital, and another, that might be a million years later, that destroys the orbital and replaces it with a bond or removes that orbital mode option by changing the nucleus through fission or fusion. The 'orbiting' is just a metaphorical mathematical device we use for predicting the likelihood of the second event occurring certain ways.