The Speed of Light Is Not About Speed (or Light)

We tend to think of the “speed of light” like a car flying down a highway—just a very, very fast one. But light isn’t a little photon bullet racing through space in the way we imagine. It’s more about how our universe communicates with itself.

Energy transfer—whether it’s light, electromagnetic waves, or any signal—propagates through spacetime at a fundamental rate. That rate isn’t arbitrarily set by light; it’s baked into the very fabric of the universe. You could call it “the universal speed limit,” the maximum speed at which any information can travel.

In other words, the speed of light is better understood as the speed of how reality interacts with itself. The reason we associate it with light is simply because light (in a vacuum) travels at that fundamental limit. If, hypothetically, the fabric of the universe allowed a faster rate of interaction, then we’d have a different “speed of light.”

So it’s not about literal speed in the everyday sense, and it’s not really just about light. It’s about the communication limit embedded in spacetime itself—the maximum rate at which cause and effect can ripple through reality.