I've been thinking about consciousness
and reality for many years now and have come to believe that the most
reasonable hypothesis is that reality is intimately related to
consciousness and that consciousness is at least as
primordial as matter and energy. Along the way, I've imagined
the universe from the point of view of a surfer riding a photon
created in the Big Bang. Because
at the speed of light time stops, that “surfer” will be
everywhere the photon will ever be in the same instant. From that
vantage point, time does not exist and one can imagine the universe,
from its moment of creation to its end, as a single crystal
containing all of spacetime.
Today I was wondering about the speed
of light and what exactly it means. One of the odd things about the
speed of light is its value, 186000 miles per second. Why is it
exactly that and what does it mean that light has a “speed” when, from the point of view of light, it is instantaneous. Perhaps the
speed of light is not its speed at all but rather the speed
of time? We experience time as a wave, passing from
past to future with its crest being the present
moment, our now. I've been reading
Montaillou – about the life of a village in southern
France in the early 14th Century – and felt myself
looking through a portal into the lives of people far away in time,
in many ways so different, but also real breathing humans just like
us. Of course, when these people were alive – when they were
riding the crest of time – theirs' was now. We now ride the
wave but it will continue beyond us. Perhaps it is time itself that
moves through the crystal universe? We see light moving at some
speed only because that is the speed with which time can record its
own passage.
It may seem strange to think of time
moving with some speed. Whether spacetime
is quantum or analog is now much in debate within physics, as well as
what the smallest moment of time or unit of space may be. But
according to relativity, the speed of light is both a measurement of
space and time. The total distance between two points in spacetime
must be conserved within the limits of the speed of light. Between
two objects at rest to each other, the distance is almost entirely
one of space because their speed relative to each other is
functionally zero. Two objects moving relative to each other at some
speed will have part of their distance in space and part in time. At
rest or at low speeds, the distance in time may be negligible. But
an extreme example is the case of the two twins. One twin stays at
home on earth and the other travels to a nearby star and back at the
speed of light. At the speed of light, the distance of the trip is
experienced mostly as time. When the twin returns to the spot where
he left, he has barely aged while his twin is an old man. What is
being measured by the “speed of light” is really the relationship
of time and space.
What is it that is traveling at the
speed of light? It's not really time but our awareness of the
distance traveled within spacetime. The speed of light may actually
be the speed of consciousness. By this I mean the speed of
our crest of awareness through the timeless, eternal crystal
universe. Whatever
consciousness caused the Big Bang, determined
the value of the Higgs boson and the parameters of physical reality,
and dumped itself into that
reality may have wanted a long vacation. At the “speed of
light” – really the speed of the wave of consciousness that
sweeps through creation – the lifetime of the expanding
universe (expanding due to dark
energy) should be counted in tens of billions of
years. An infinite string of nows flung like pearls upon the wine dark sea.
