Discourses on The Speed Of Light

Thanks to the development of Natural Philosophy we've unveiled a great deal about the nature.. But Sometime Nature is too stubborn to unravel all its glory before the imbeciles like us.. We, creatively enough, named these glories, paradoxes..

This paradoxes may represent themselves in various ways.. Like whether Zeno's turtle wins the race or not, or Schrödinger's Cat is dead or alive..(pay a visit to the omniscient Google to know about them and of their likings.)

There is one particular Paradox which shapes our everyday life..And The paradox is of the Speed of Light..

Now you may say why should we care?? Then let me remind you from the very contraption on which you're now reading the raving of a lunatic, like me; to you, yourself, your existence are just some consequences of this CONSTANT, which we believe to be..To me, one must wonder about the very basic of our existence not just being a scientist but being a conscious being..

Enough of the introduction.. The paradox regarding the speed of light is that we don't know whether a beam or photon, whatever you want call it, always travels at the speed 'C' which 299,792,458 m/s..

But how can that be?? It is such a rudimentary concept that we've changed our so call called UNIT SYSTEM according to it and still we're in obscurity whether this is always the C or not!!

Well we're certain that the two way speed of light is C that is the average speed by which light beam travels from A to B an mid back..

but we don't know if it's C in one direction or not..

But why can't we know about it?? Well to answer that we must know something else..

Relativity of Simultaneity

The idea of absolute Simultaneity, which basically that the NOW is same all over the universe, falls apart once we face the very meaning of Simultaneity..

Einstein from his 1905's paper on "ON THE ELECTRODYNAMICS OF MOVING BODIES", which we now know as the "Special Relativity" showed us as long as the THE IDEA OF RELATIVITY (if you measure a dog is moving at the speed 2 m/s to the west, the dog will measure you're moving 2 m/s to the east) holds to all INERTIAL FRAMES (frames which are stationary or moving at a constant speed relative to the observer) as well as THE LAWS OF ELECTRODYNAMICS particularly the existence of a finite speed limit is true, all the basic quantitative physical unit of the nature like LENGTH, INERTIA, TIME have to adjust accordingly...

So, the idea of absolute Simultaneity is meaningless as there is no existence of an absolute time..

The most intriguing fact about these units are that the laws which governs the transformation of these units ( LORENTZ TRANSFORMATION) are solely depend on the finite speed (Speed of light) and the velocity of these objects with respect to the observer..

Allow me to be clear by an example,


Suppose a friend of yours moving at some constant speed relative to you, now you want to experience the passage of time for your friend from your perspective.. In other words how long is a second to your friend relative to yours..

You may think that the obvious answer to this question is both of you will experience the duration of a second same.. but it's not true..
At first this may seem absurd but if you take the two principles (the principle of Relativity and the constancy of the speed of light) true at the same time, which certainly has both theoretical and experimental support, then we have reconsider our obvious intuitive experiences..

Keeping these in mind we arrive at the following relation..

So, we can see that that the time dialation not only due the constant speed of light but also quantitatively depends on the very speed of the object relative to the observer..

Sometimes nature is far more bizarre than we can imagine..

Problems regarding the one way speed of light

Now let's see why we can't measure the one way speed of light..

To measure the speed of light we first have to synchronize the both clock residing at the source and the reflector..

But the problem is how do you synchronize the both clock as there is no ABSOLUTE TIME??

If you think that you'd synchronize the clocks at one of the two points first, then you'll take one clock to the other point, then let me remind you, that for a moving body time passes differently relative to a stationary observer as we've concluded from the above expression..By the time the other clock reaches at the point it's already out of sync..

If we take another plan to synchronize them which is to bring the both clocks at the centre of the path and synchronize them and then return them to their respective locations.. even though we're starting at the middle and we anticipate that time dialation would be same for the both of the clocks so our clock would be synchronized. But again if we consider the speed of light is different at the different directions then again the clocks will be out of sync as we can extrapolate from the time dialation equation.. We may flash a light pulse from a clock to sync the other but since the light travels at a finite speed, it would take sometime to reach the other.. So, no means we can think of won't work...

You may ask what if we use some method which instantaneously reach the other clock synchronizing both of them.. well, the whole essence of 19th and 20th century natural philosophy lies on the very foundation of the idea that two locations in the universe can't communicate faster than the speed of light or they will violate the Principle of CAUSALITY which tells that an effect is due to a cause..
This at the heart of our problem.. since we can't even know if the clocks at the ends read the same time at a moment we can't measure the speed as it extensively depends on the time taken..

So the only way to measure the one way speed of light is to know the Speed of light..

This problem regarding the synchronization of the clock is called EINSTEIN SYNCHRONIZATION PROBLEM..Einstein pointed this out in his paper..

To settle this dilemma Einstein stipulated that the time taken by the light to travel from A to B is the same to the time taken by the light to travel B to A..

And that makes the matter of the speed of light subjective..

Einstein showed the only thing we can know about the speed of light is the two way speed of light.. which is the average speed at which the beam or the photon traverses the path from the source to the reflector and back..

Later Einstein later said about his convention,
" Neither a supposition nor a hypothesis about the physical nature of light but a stipulation that I can make of my own free will to arrive at a definition of Simultaneity.."

Consequences

The laws of Physics won't change as long as the two way speed of light is C but think about the consequences.
If the speed of light is C/2 in one direction and infinite on the other.. then the object which is some distance will appear instantaneous as it is now or will appear twice the old than we may conclude..

For example if the light takes twice time to reach to a distant solar system from Earth and takes no time in return journey then, the people on Earth will see the solar system in real time but the aliens on the solar system would see twice old Earth..

If the speed of light is different at the different directions then the reason may cause another paradigmatic leap in our understanding of the universe..