A flash of light in an achronal existence…

Consider a pond into which you lob a stone…You watch the ripples travel outwards from where the stone disappeared beneath the surface and you watch them reach a small float. It responds, bobbing a bit up and down as the wave passes it…

You could imagine speeding the sequence up or down, the result would be the same and you could always watch the wave gently spread outwards and pass the float.

From the float’s point of view the wave is seen approaching, passing underneath and then continuing outwards and away.

The reason, of course, why we can observe this is that light, that which transmits the information about the moving wave to us, or to the float, moves so fast…faster than anything else in the universe. So it is always ahead of the wave travelling across the pond.

Now, imagine that we are instead observing a wave of light as it propagates outwards from a light source, perhaps a bulb that we switch on. Can we observe the wave of light, like we observe the wave of water?

No, we can’t. Nothing can go faster than light so no signal can be emitted from a photon to reach us before it (the photon) reaches us. No matter how fast, or slow, light travels, assuming that it is defined by it being that which travels at the cosmic speed limit we can never observe it’s actual journey, the ripples it makes as the waves travel through space.

A flash of light will always just be a flash of light, not a slowly approaching wave.

This is because light lives in an achronal (“timeless”) world; the only thing that can reach its future is itself and its past consist only of itself (and the process that created it.)

The structure of our universe and the very concept of past and present; all these things are beautifully connected.

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