The Speed of Light: Constancy and Cosmos

7. Light in a Vacuum

Internal Relations · 77 My intent in rehearsing Bohm and Pribram’s hypotheses is to suggest that even if these thinkers may be wrong in part, they are still right in breaking with the mechanistic model of reality that elevates parts at the expense of wholes. Further, given this elevation or exaltation of parts, it becomes very difficult to understand light and light-related experiments that open out onto nonlocality. If nothing more, Bohm and Pribram loosen up our thinking in a good way. We are now ready to think about internal relations. Internal versus External Relations Perhaps the best way to understand internal relations in general is to interrogate our unquestioned commitment to the idea of external relations. No one denies that various things are interrelated. The question at issue, however, is whether relations are (1) merely incidental to those things or (2) constitutive of their being. The general response is (1): things exist on their own and then get related to each other. A particular rock, for example, exists independently of all other things (e.g., other rocks, trees, etc.); it does not borrow its existence, via relationality, from those things. This is the concept of external relations, and it is the lens through which we typically see and understand the world—a world that then makes sense as a mechanistic system. Think of two billiard balls in collision. Because the balls are deemed self-existing entities, any collision—any relation—between the two must be unessential or external to their fundamental nature. Accordingly, the balls bounce off each other and proceed unchanged on their way. Granted, their momentum is altered, but that alteration took effect at the moment of collision and then, according to Newton’s first law of motion, simply persists in virtue of the lifelessness or inertness of the affected bodies. That is, the balls are not enriched or enlarged ontologically on account of the collision. They remain blank within, and all interaction or relation between them is incidental to that irremediable blankness. Simply put, they have no inner state or subjectivity upon which relations can impinge. This is the outlook that informs modern thought, and for many it seems unassailable. Why, after all, would anyone want to ascribe 78 · The Speed of Light inner subjectivity to a billiard ball? But no metaphysical position of this type is beyond criticism. Consider that some things clearly borrow their existence, by way of relationality, from other things. We may say that summer is warmer than winter, but it is just this temperature relation (among other things) that enables the reality of summer. Winter and summer are different seasons that nevertheless lean into each other, and both gain in richness or intensity as the contrast between the two widens. Here, then, is an example of internal relations: the relation is internal to or constitutive of the thing being scrutinized. If we widen the relational web of summer sufficiently, we include ourselves, and then the idea of internal relations comes home. To some significant extent, each person is shaped by the summers she has experienced: those summers did not leave her unchanged. Further , each summer, by being implicative of other seasons and therefore inclusive of them, in turn triggers wider associations. Where this expanding cascade of relations ends no one can say; it is coincidental with life itself. No person is a freestanding entity; each is a nexus or knot in the vast relational web. In discriminating between internal and external relations, much depends on level of detail, the focal adjustment of one’s analysis. At a higher or more macroscopic level external relations, or the assumption thereof, may coincide perfectly with what one expects to observe: mindless, self-contained entities in mechanical interaction . But details begin to wash out with greater resolution or tighter focal adjustment, and this strips the entities of interest of their welldetailed self-containment. Or, to follow the prevailing interpretation of quantum physics, at this more fundamental level entities of interest (electrons, etc.) intrinsically lack the kind of detail associated with large-scale, apparently self-contained objects like billiard balls. And without that detail, nothing exists to neatly circumscribe their reality in space and time. If this sounds counterintuitive, it really is not. Bohm offers the analogy of language. One can analyze a story in the hope of understanding it better, but at some point—at about the level of individual words and letters—the analysis process backfires. Understanding or meaning begins to fuzz out...