What if Einstein was wrong about ‘c’?

I think it is very likely that Einstein was wrong when he said that ‘c’ in “E = mc2” represented “the speed of light in a perfect vacuum.” I will argue below that, while this is a factually correct statement, it is only coincidentally so. This definition of ‘c’ misunderstands the true nature of the constant of ‘c’. What do I think ‘c’ is actually? I will argue in this blog post that ‘c’ is, more precisely, the constant that represents zero slowness.

I’ll argue further, that this distinction between “‘c’ is a very fast speed” vs “’c’ is the least-slow speed” is both a critical and helpful tool in our efforts to understand the world around us.

Challenging our Prevalent Paradigms about “Speed”

Humans experience life through the lens of very slow-moving bodies. We imagine ourselves ‘still’ and ‘at rest’ even as we are on a planet moving thousands of miles per hour through space. Even that phrase “thousands of miles per hour” seems intuitively super-fast to us, but it doesn’t even register on the scale of how very-small and very-fast things actually do travel in the universe.

What if our thousands of years of collective human experience have given us foundationally deficient paradigms and language for describing the faster natures of our universe?

Zero Slowness as a Limit

For our discussion, we shall define ‘slowness’ not as merely the inverse of velocity, but as a distinct concept that helps us rethink motion, particularly at velocities approaching the speed of light, denoted as ‘c’. Traditionally we would use “velocity” as a measure of how fast something moves in a given direction, and velocity always carries with it a directionality or “vector”. In contrast to this, slowness — as conceptualized here — focuses on the relative measure of inertial rest, where ‘very slow’ things have high inertia and things with what we’ll call ‘near-zero slowness’ have extremely low inertial threshold. Thus ‘c’ is envisioned not just as the supreme velocity but as the ultimate boundary of ‘zero slowness’.

By conceptualizing ‘c’ as a state of ‘zero slowness’, we gain a unique lens through which to view and understand the mechanics of the universe, challenging and expanding on established theories of relativity. This framework not only enhances our understanding of high-velocity phenomena but also preserves the natural order, preventing paradoxes that would arise from violating this fundamental limit.

The Impact of Eliminating Faster-Than-Light Travel

There are many implications of the ‘c = zero slowness theory’. One particularly important and helpful implication of this theory is that it provides a thorough and elegant foundation for an already-held intuition: that faster than light (“FTL”) travel is categorically impossible. It follows directly that if ‘c’ is in fact zero slowness, there can never be something faster than ‘c’, and FTL travel can sensibly and rationally be removed from physical possibilities.

Below are some further implications of this much firmer foundation for the impossibility of FTL travel.

Upholding Causality

One of the cornerstones of physics is causality: the principle that a cause precedes its effect. Einstein’s theory of relativity, when considering the impossibility of faster-than-light (FTL) travel, solidly upholds causality. This fundamental limitation ensures that the sequence of cause and effect remains inviolable, thus avoiding any paradoxes where an effect might precede its cause. If it is true that ‘c’ is zero slowness, a limit which cannot be broken even in theory, then these paradoxes of causality are solved in a tidy manner. (Queue the mourning of sci-fi writers everywhere.)

Simplifying Energy Requirements

As objects accelerate towards the speed of light, their relativistic mass increases, necessitating exponentially more energy for further acceleration. The impossibility of FTL travel means objects are not required to reach or exceed the speed of light, thereby circumventing the theoretical need for infinite energy for acceleration. This simplification keeps the theory within the bounds of practical energy constraints.

Eliminating Tachyons

Tachyons are hypothetical particles that, if they existed, would travel faster than light and exhibit imaginary mass, challenging the conventional understanding of physics. By asserting FTL travel as impossible, the theory of relativity excludes the existence of tachyons and the complex implications they would entail, such as backward time travel, ensuring a more coherent framework.

Maintaining the Flow of Information

In a universe where FTL travel is possible, information could theoretically be sent back in time, leading to paradoxes that challenge the consistency of cause and effect. By firmly maintaining that FTL travel is impossible, relativity ensures that the flow of information is strictly bound by the speed of light, aligning with our observations of how information propagates through the universe.

Side-Stepping Wormholes and Warp Drives

Concepts like wormholes and the Alcubierre warp drive exploit theoretical loopholes in general relativity to envisage FTL travel by bending space-time. These concepts, while fascinating, require forms of matter and energy that defy our current understanding and have not been empirically verified. By declaring FTL impossible, these speculative concepts, along with their myriad complications such as the need for exotic matter and the astronomical energy required, are effectively sidelined. This approach brings the focus back to observable and measurable aspects of the universe within our current theoretical framework.

Explaining the “Wavelike” Behavior of Fast-moving Particles

A classic physics problem we all learn in high school is the behavior of particles and light to sometimes behave like a wave and sometimes behave like a particle. The wavelike behavior is puzzling to us and is the basis for many problematic theories of the universe. What if there is an easier explanation?

From our perspective of considering human-level scale, we expect objects at motion to stay in motion — and we expect this to be the case, that they continue in the same direction or “vector” unless outside forces are exerted on them. While this makes sense for very slow things, and it makes sense if we are measuring ‘speed’ or ‘velocity’, it breaks down (rightfully so) when we think of velocity measured as ‘slowness’. If very-fast things are more precisely measured in terms of their slowness, this changes how we should think of their movement through space. Unlike velocity, the concept of slowness itself is not committed to any given vector.

In the classic movie “Speed”, the bus driver has a slowness threshold (much not travel less than 50 miles per hour) but that slowness designation does not demand any specific vector or path, except as dictated by the turn radius of a vehicle traveling at that speed. Just as the slowness of the bus in the movie ‘Speed’ does not confine it to one unchangeable path, but rather a range of potential paths within its velocity constraints, in the quantum realm (where near-zero-slowness is the default), particles similarly exhibit the lack of a predetermined vector. Their ‘near-zero slowness’ does not rigidly determine their trajectory but instead allows for a spectrum of possible routes, dictated by the underlying principles of uncertainty and probability that govern quantum mechanics.

In the same way for very-fast particles, their slowness can be constant, while their vector and velocity are constantly changing. By describing the concept of slowness as the governing principal, many puzzling behaviors become more naturally explainable. For example, we gain an amazingly simple explanation for why no outside energy needs to be exerted for the particle to change its trajectory — this can simply be explained as the natural behavior of very-not-slow things in the universe.

In Summary

We have started here an examination here for a new perspective on the native of relative velocities, and the impact that our chosen paradigms can have on rationalizing concepts that otherwise seem unreconcilable. We have seen many examples of how our limited focus around velocities as ‘fast vectors’ fails, where a measure of ‘slowness’ is more apt. We have also explained through this theory why ‘c’ is a hard limit that will never and can never be broken, exactly because it is ‘0’ on the slowness spectrum and there is neither a theoretical nor practical way to go slower than zero slowness.

All that said, this can only be considered the beginning of what I hope will be a much longer discussion. For instance, if slowness of zero is a hard limit on one end of the spectrum, are we still correct to assume that ‘zero velocity’ is a valid conceptual limit on the other end of it? Is “zero velocity” even still a plausible concept given what we know about the ever-increasing expansion of the universe? What if it is possible to have a “slowness” effect beyond what we would otherwise observe as “zero relative velocity”? Would large celestial bodies like planets and stars exhibit have an extreme slowness beyond what we can measure in their velocities? Could that extreme slowness exert an effect on their encompassing spacetime? What would the differences be between an ‘extreme and contagious slowness’ versus what we observe today and call “gravity”?

I hope this is the start of a much longer conversation. We have only just scratched the surface, and much more work may be needed to fully explore these ideas.

Call for Comments

Please drop a note in the comments if you found this interesting. Let me know what you think. Are these ideas (a) obvious enough to be boring or (b) foundationally controversial or flawed? Let me know if you’d like to explore these concepts in more detail, and/or if you are aware of anyone who has — or is interested in — similar studies.