hammock under canopy of trees (Photo – piqsels.com)
E=mc² is the equation that Einstein made famous, by being able to explain so much of our world within a unified system, including the manner of space-time and the transmutable nature of energy and matter.
By Glenn Storm
It’s a beautifully simple sequence of letters that give rise to an enormous complexity and remains a cultural fascination. E is the energy portion of the equation; M is mass that describes energy’s relation to matter. The C is often confused, or simply short-handed as, “the speed of light”; but it is actually representative of the speed of causality.
Light is understood to travel at this speed of causality, and so do other dynamics, such as radio waves, photon changes in magnetism, etc. Commonly, it is understood that this speed is something of a speed limit, that nothing can travel faster than it. It may be more accurate to say, the causality we understand, the causality we exist within, allows light to exist in different space-time; it allows the dynamics of mass-energy within space-time to occur.
The difference is subtle. This understanding no longer acts as an analogy of a vehicle; light is not pushing through matter as it travels through space in a span of time. Instead, it exists within causality, which by its nature is forming the space-time and dynamics of mass-energy.
To swing in the hammock that defied causality, is to muse on the notion that causality can be defied; that the hammock, the motion of the swing, that idea that this happened in the past, is a notion only framed within causality.
It is a theory that we only know a causal world with exceptions that perplex us in their defiance of causality, such as a black hole or the big bang.
We wonder, “Where does the mass-energy and the space-time go when it falls into a black hole?”, and the question itself is riddled with assumptions rooted in causality. We puzzle, “What came before the big bang, and why did it happen?”, and again, we are trapped within the cage of a framework bound by space-time and mass-energy that is given existence only by the nature of causality.
What would it be like, instead, to swing on a hammock in all-time? That is, in the past, present and future, without limits. What is the motion of the swing, if not a residual effect of causality on mass-energy and space-time?
Would a swing in this hammock not be in all parts of the swing in space, and at all times? Would the hammock not be both a comfortable weave of string and the overwhelming energy equivalent, and not bound to one transmutation or the other?
The idea that there are observable phenomenon that suggest defiance of causality suggests something further: that our attempts to understand that which extends beyond causality simply exists outside causality; that existence beyond our causal space-time and mass-energy framework is indicated by these phenomenon, instead of these phenomenon defying our understanding of causality.
Perhaps our questions about the expansion of the universe, and in particular, the evidence that this expansion is accelerating, can likewise be reframed with causality in absentia. Is our universe becoming all-space at all-time, as a natural settling from causality to non-causality?
Is our known universe a fleeting, swirling eddy of causality in a larger non-causal pond?
Let’s continue to casually swing back and forth under these trees, as the dots of sunlight that break the canopy rake over our eyelids; back and forth. Back and forth.
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