Why the Speed of Light Might Be a Processing Limit, Not a Coincidence
Physics textbooks tell us that nothing can travel faster than light — but they rarely explain why the universe picked that particular speed. Why not twice as fast? Why not infinite? Why should space and time care about one very specific number?
In this work, we explore a different way of looking at the problem. Instead of treating the speed of light as a mysterious axiom built into spacetime, we ask a more basic question: what if the universe itself has a maximum rate at which it can create stable facts? If reality is built from irreversible events — genuine “this happened” distinctions — then there must be a limit to how quickly those distinctions can propagate without breaking consistency.
From that perspective, the speed of light starts to look less like a random constant and more like a throughput limit: the fastest rate at which information can be processed, stabilized, and shared across the universe.
Why Light, of All Things, Hits the Limit
A single isolated bit of information can’t really travel. On its own, it smears out, decoheres, or becomes ambiguous. What can travel is a closed, self-consistent packet of information — what we call a fold. A fold is the smallest structure that can carry a stable distinction from one place to another without losing its identity.
Electromagnetic radiation turns out to be the most efficient fold nature allows. It requires the fewest irreversible commitments to exist, stay coherent, and propagate universally. That’s not an accident — it’s a structural minimum. Light doesn’t set the speed limit because photons are special by decree; it sets the speed limit because nothing cheaper, simpler, or more efficient can exist.
If you accept that reality must be built from stable facts, then something has to sit at the top of the causal hierarchy. In this framework, light sits there because it’s the least expensive way to move information without breaking the rules.
A Surprising Middle Scale in the Universe
One of the most unexpected results of the analysis is the appearance of a mesoscopic coherence scale — a length that’s neither microscopic nor cosmic. Too small, and information collapses under quantum instability. Too large, and it loses coherence because the universe itself is only loosely synchronized.
Balancing those two failure modes leads to a characteristic size given by the geometric mean of the smallest meaningful scale (the Planck scale) and the largest coherent scale (set by cosmology). Remarkably, this lands at tens of micrometers — around 80 μm.
This scale isn’t put in by hand. It emerges naturally from asking what size an information-carrying structure must have to survive both quantum fragility and cosmological incoherence. In the paper, this scale becomes the missing link connecting quantum physics, gravity, and the speed of light.
What This Paper Does — and Does Not — Claim
This work does not claim to magically derive the speed of light from nothing. What it does show is something more subtle and arguably more important: the constants of physics are not freely adjustable once you demand stable information flow.
If the mesoscopic coherence scale were measured independently, the framework would no longer allow the speed of light to vary freely — it would be fixed by consistency with quantum action, gravity, and cosmology. If that scale is instead computed using relations that already include the speed of light, the result collapses to a self-consistency check. The paper is explicit about that distinction.
In other words, this is not numerology. It’s a structural constraint: a demonstration that the universe cannot simultaneously choose arbitrary values for its fundamental limits and remain coherent.
A Different Way to Think About Relativity
Finally, the framework offers a reinterpretation — not a modification — of special relativity. All the mathematics stays the same. All the experimental predictions stay the same. What changes is the story underneath.
In this view, time dilation isn’t spacetime stretching; it’s a reduction in local update rate. Length contraction isn’t physical compression; it’s fewer stable correlation layers being maintained along the direction of motion. The Lorentz factor becomes a measure of how the universe reallocates its finite processing capacity.
The speed of light remains invariant because it isn’t “distance per time” at heart — it’s the maximum rate at which correlated facts can propagate, shared by all observers no matter how their local clocks tick.
The Big Picture
At its core, this paper suggests a simple but radical shift:
The speed of light may not be a mysterious property of spacetime — it may be the fastest speed at which reality itself can think without contradicting itself.
If that’s even partly true, then light, gravity, quantum mechanics, and cosmology are not separate stories. They’re different faces of the same constraint: a universe built from irreversible facts can only go so fast.