The reports regarding the experiments that showed neutrinos achieving a higher speed than that of the light have hit international headlines. I have been arguing for more than 15 years that the light-speed barrier is the greatest blunder ever of the modern physics. Light cannot be allowed to adorn divinity, which turns its small speed into an infinite one for all practical purposes. Light-speed barrier is an artificial barrier erected by Einstein’s mind. Physicists have unfortunately turned this barrier into a wall that cannot be scaled. This is despite the accumulating evidences at the microscopic as well as the macroscopic level pointing to the brittle nature of the foundation of this wall. To talk of light-speed as the fastest possible speed is like talking in the tenth century of the speed of the horse being the fastest achievable speed in the world. Einstein cannot be allowed to don the role of Final Prophet whose word cannot be challenged or changed.
In my book, Rediscovering the Universe and several papers published in online American journals known for presenting alternative viewpoints (Nature and Science, American Journal of Science & Academia Arena) I have argued that light speed barrier has become the biggest impediment in understanding the universe. The universe appears from all the plausible evidences to be a well-knot state like organisation, which cannot run without extremely fast and effective means of communication. No state and no organisation can work without an effective communication. And if Einstein’s light speed barrier is accepted, it means that the universe is surviving and functioning without any effective means of communication.
I have also raised questions regarding how laws of nature did originate and how they are being enforced. I have also been able to show that Big Bang theory is in truth not a theory of creation at all. It only describes how an already existing massive energy-mass contained within a point of singularity of infinitely small size started getting redistributed due to sudden onset of its expansion. It was mainly Einstein’s ideas and his equations that compelled physicists to think of the universe beginning at a point where all the present laws break down. It is ironical to believe that present laws were derived from a situation where these laws had no tangible or perceptible existence.
The history of modern Physics is witness to how Einstein used his idea of light-speed barrier to bulldoze almost every other theory; how he constructed theories and formulas to adjust almost every mechanism to its demands. One mistake of light-speed barrier led to hundreds of errors being accepted by the community of physicists. This is another matter that Einstein and the posterity of physicists did so considering that the falsehood of light-speed barrier was the truth that has to be accepted at all costs. To quote a small example, warping effect can hardly explain the gravity at a large scale, unless Einstein’s light-speed barrier is given up. Further, despite the fact that nonlocality is now regarded as consistent with quantum mechanics, Einstein’s influence on physics is such that the fundamental idea of the light-speed barrier has not been dropped.
The universe viewed in the light of General Theory of Relativity and Big Bang Cosmology is a passive, clumsily stark looking collection of individual groups of matter. Quantum Mechanics makes it even more shambolic by shrouding it in the dark clouds of uncertainties. The universe itself appears to have hardly any dynamic existence. It seems to be a universe, which was in a highly excited state at the time of Big Bang, but has since then lost its virility; it has willy-nilly bequeathed all its properties to the material that it contains without retaining anything for itself. The sphere of the universe itself continues to expand without anything adding to it except an increasing emptiness in space. It is becoming increasingly hollower with the ticking of the clock; its hollowness is making the components of the world strangers to one another with every passing moment of time, because galaxies are falling apart from one another.
The distance between all the parts of the universe is growing but the vehicle of communication available to them is limping with the same old velocity. The space is continuously growing, and growing fast; where it is coming from, nobody knows. The expansion of the universe is not expanding its wealth, resources and means; the communication is getting harder, the overall density is declining and the matter is huddling into ghettos. God has either been banished to a place from where He cannot regulate or control it, or has been converted into a nominal Head of a defunct State soon after the first tiny fraction of the second of the beginning of the creation. Even if He is there, He cannot play any discernible role. There are many, of course, who are not ready to assign anything or any role to God, in the past, present or future, declaring Him to be the creation rather than the creator of the creatures.
Einstein manufactured his ideas about light-constancy and tried to fit everything into it. In doing so, he consciously or unconsciously tried to turn the minibus of light-speed barrier into an omnibus that would absorb the whole universe. Even from an empirical point of view, this is extremely difficult to believe that a small speed like that of light can be of any help in understanding the functioning of the universe. The universe is so vast that in its backdrop, the light-speed is nothing but mere crawl. To keep the universe functioning the way it is functioning, much speedier ways of communication would be needed.
It is also interesting to note that Einstein’s First Postulate says that physical laws in all the co-ordinate systems are the same. This postulate in itself is the cause of contradiction for the postulate of light-speed constancy, as how so vastly distant co-ordinate systems can regularly communicate to know about these laws and keep following them without fail. It can be argued that these laws are the same because they all had their origin in the Big Bang. But soon after the Big Bang they got separated by huge distances, making most of them unable to communicate with one another. Why then do the same laws prevail everywhere in the universe? We know from our daily experiences that the enforcement of law requires a constant vigil in the whole land. What then, makes the matter so obedient all over the universe?
The chief foundations of modern Physics comprise the two mutually contradicting theories of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. One argues that there can be no communication faster than that of light, the other vehemently challenges it by apparently enabling particles to communicate at much higher velocity. Nevertheless, Einsteinianism rules. This is despite the fact that Einstein himself accepted that light constancy was logically difficult to explain but empirically proved by experiments.
Ironically, in his development of the special and general theories, he depended on empirical facts, but did not accept the same logic in Quantum mechanics, where he insisted on refuting the experimental results on the basis of his idealism, founded on the empirical constancy of light. The question here is: can anything empirical be illogical? Whatever we observe as the results of experiments has to be based on certain laws, and even if our experiments or we differ from what is actual or real there has to be a basis of this difference. There was nothing diabolical with the empirical “constancy” of light-speed. The absurdity is the unexceptionable fascination Einstein developed for light, turning constancy into an absolute dogma that gives light a sheet anchor role.
Taking a clue from Scriptures perhaps that often describe God as “Light”, he too started believing light as divine. This resulted in his giving a kind of absoluteness to light that was only a prerogative of God. He had developed an unshakeable belief in his heart and mind that nothing can surpass light in attributes. This was evident in his total approach in the development of the infrastructure of physics. He made the light-speed constancy as the foundation stone of the edifice he wanted to construct. This, not his idea of cosmological constant described by him as “my greatest blunder”, was in truth his greatest folly.
There is no logical reason why a small speed like that of light—small in the backdrop of the gigantic universe—can be accepted as the maximum. It was perhaps his belief in the absoluteness of light that he devised a formula for gamma that had the stamp of divinity for light. It made impossible for anything to travel faster than the electromagnetic wave-particle. It positioned light as the Final Criterion relative to which all speeds would be measured and all the properties of the matter would change. This is also perhaps the reason that he used c2, instead of a numerical constant, in his famous mass-energy equation. Does that not mean that he might have believed everything was created ultimately of light?
And as nothing has so far been proved beyond to travel faster than light, no physicist has dared challenge his ideas. The increasing likelihood of the nonlocality of quantum mechanics, the apparent faster than light speeds of quasars, the faster than light initial expansion of the universe—all these evidences have faded before Einstein’s thunderous claim. Physicists have simply prostrated before the idol of Einstein.
[The author is a thinker and has several books to his credit including “Rediscovering the Universe”, “The Devil of Economic Fundamentalism”, “The Killer Sex” and “Westernism: the Ideology of Hegemony”. He can be contacted at [email protected]]