All the facts we've discussed trying to see the world through the eyes of a photon have quite massive implications for our understanding of the universe:
- Matter feels spacetime: Each piece of matter moving through the universe experiences different spacetime ratios, depending on its motion.
- Carriers don't feel spacetime: Massless quanta at c don't experience spacetime dimensions. Distance, duration, locality and causality are meaningless at light speed.
- Interactions are new each time: Each observer has the consistent illusion of an evolving universe caused by the continuous detection of carriers coming from other places. This constant influx of information composes the "frames" of reality that allow them to infer the dynamics for matter and energy in the universe. These causal rules only apply to "persistent" matter connections, where floods of similar exchanges (closely related in origin, distance, frequency and duration) keep taking place consistently, but they're not valid for each individual interaction.
- Total energy of the universe is zero: Any energy transference we observe is an instantaneous action-reaction event for the carriers involved, so they don't even feel the energy imbalances that set out their journeys, as their proper time is zero. The universe is a zero-sum game of energy conversions, but for each interaction supporting the play, everything appears balanced in an instant.
- Absorption is part of any exchange: Any carrier traversing any medium at c will be absorbed somewhere else. It has to be that way because, otherwise, the journey never really starts (remember, emission and absorption is the same thing for them). A carrier “in flight” is just the promise that an exchange, interaction or measurement will take place, no matter what. Once we know a carrier has left birth place, we can be sure it'll pop up elsewhere following the c speed rule, because the contract is already settled for the carrier. If we put something trying to stop it, our actions contributed to the history it tells when it materializes on our detector.
- Carriers don't have intrinsic properties: Any spatio-temporal magnitude or constant we assign to a carrier when detected doesn't belong to the carrier itself. Those properties describe something about the conditions that took place during the whole journey, what made that particular carrier manifest in reality. Properties like energy, frequency or momentum are specific to each individual matter interaction, but vacuum constants like Planck constant or the speed of light tell something about the way all exchanges come into existence.
- Interactions shape the geometry of spacetime: General Relativity states that matter and energy warp the geometry of spacetime. Now, we know the interactions that transmit information also support spacetime, so we could say matter presence sets how and how many exchanges develop each time. That's why mass (or charge, or flavour, or any other property of matter) is able to “bend” spacetime: curved spacetime is nothing more than a higher probability of having interactions on a region due to how matter is arranged (there and elsewhere). There's even a mass/volume ratio (the Schwarzschild radius) that defines regions of space where the matter configuration is so dense that any carrier generated inside can't escape anywhere else, as all possible paths end on a matter particle contained there (that is, black holes).
- Time travel to the past is impossible: We can compress or expand time intervals changing velocity, but not reorder the interactions. Observers can't reach instantaneity, as they move below c. It's true that each observer has its own subjective way of ordering events depending on speed, but there's no way an observer could detect a carrier before it's emitted.
- c speed = infinite speed: It doesn't matter there's a speed limit in the universe because, for all purposes, things that travel at c feel they're instantaneous. They traverse any distance in no time (for themselves) so they're, effectively, teleporting instantly at infinite speed.
- All forces are contact forces: Long time ago, humanity thought all forces were contact forces, but then some forces seemed to act at a distance. Later on, we stated all forces act at a distance by gauge boson exchanges (except gravity, maybe?). But, from the point of view of things going at c, all forces are “contact” forces because they don't feel any spacetime taking place, they just “happen to be”.
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