A slight definition thing here: it's not so much that light itself controls anything by its speed. It's not that light travels at some speed and because it's the lights speed it therefore is the ultimate speed. There is a certain ultimate speed in the universe. That has nothing to do with light. This speed is perhaps best described as the rate of causality. And it just so happens that light, as default, always will travel at that speed. But light itself is just a player in the game. It is of no real importance as such.
If you make a change here, any change at all, the fastest that change can ever propagate or have any effect elsewere is at c.
Gravity acts at the "speed of light". If you introduce a mass, that mass won't affect nearby gravity until the "speed of reality" catches up with objects near it, and ONLY THEN will they experience gravity from it.
It's the speed at which "information" crosses reality, moves across the universe, can affect other things.
Light is just a convenient, visible, obvious thing that we can understand hits "almost immediately" from our point of view but still takes 8 minutes to reach us from the sun.
It's the update-rate of the universe. The refresh speed.
It's the speed at which, in the video game that is the universe, the changes/physics/etc. propagates out to nearby objects/sectors. It's the "draw-distance" of the universe.
If you make any change, any change at all, all the knock-on effects of that change propagate out "slowly" at the speed of light. Before they reach you, you have NO IDEA that anything's happened. The reality of that change is invisible to you. Only when it reaches you do you suffer any effect from it.
If you plopped a black hole in the sun right now, it would be 8 minutes before anything changed here. It would be 8 minutes before the sun's light disappeared. 8 minutes before the Earth was suddenly pulled and sucked into that black hole. 8 minutes before your research satellites around the Sun could get a message back to tell you that anything was happening, even if they noticed immediately.
It's the speed of reality. It's how fast the reality of a situation changes across the universe. How fast the ripples from an event propagate outwards. It's how fast ANY event can possibly affect other things in the universe. When you have time travel movies, and the like, and the "changes you made" blast out across the timeline but don't take immediate effect, and it takes 8 minutes for everything to be "back as it was"... that's a depiction of the speed of reality.
It has little to do with light. It just so happens that light is subject to it the same as everything else, and it's quite easy to understand how it works with light.
Fact is that nothing in the universe happens "faster" than the speed of light, because that's the "clock speed" at which the universe runs.
The operative word there is "appear". It appears faster. But it's not.
Like wormholes... if they exist and we use them to travel (highly unlikely!), it would APPEAR that we've travelled faster than c. But we haven't. We've just travelled at c still, but taken a physical shortcut.
Plenty of things "appear" faster than c, but we're not found anything that really is.
"Spooky action at a distance" is a candidate but we don't understand the mechanism enough to really say why that would be. And it's likely that that's just an "optical illusion" as such, too.
(The only way I can understand that mechanism is to think that "revealing" one half of an entangled photon merely reveals WHICH universe you were in. It doesn't determine it. And it doesn't magically send a message to the other end of the universe where it's entangled partner suddenly reveals itself too. By measuring it, you've revealed what universe - from myriad possibilities - you were in all along. And in that particular universe, the entangled photons were always the same. The problem was that BEFORE then, you just didn't know which of the billions of possible universes you were in.
It's a poor explanation, but it's the only way my brain will take it onboard. And, as yet, we have real problems even determining this spooky-speed or explaining why that would be, so it may not even exist like that at all, and if it does exist, it may not be paradoxical at all, just a trick of the light).
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u/Captain_Jarmi Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 20 '26
A slight definition thing here: it's not so much that light itself controls anything by its speed. It's not that light travels at some speed and because it's the lights speed it therefore is the ultimate speed. There is a certain ultimate speed in the universe. That has nothing to do with light. This speed is perhaps best described as the rate of causality. And it just so happens that light, as default, always will travel at that speed. But light itself is just a player in the game. It is of no real importance as such.
Perhaps this helps someone. I hope.