Einstein deduced that the speed of light is constant from how our world behaves, not from any cause, so why does light have a constant speed? If light is particles moving, why can’t we nudge them to go just a bit faster, at the speed of light plus one? According to current physics, our universe has a speed limit because:
“… the speed of light is a constant because it just is, and because light is not made of anything simpler.” (Laughlin, 2005), p15.
Yet “because it just is” has never been a good reason in science. Particles move according to their mass, so shouldn’t photons with no mass go at any speed? In contrast, the speed of a wave should depend on the medium that transmits it, but there is no ether so light has no medium. However light as a wave on a network will move at the rate of that network, so how fast is that?
A 5GHz computer network runs at 5,000,000,000 cycles per second, which seems fast but Planck time suggests that the quantum network cycles at an astonishing 1045 times a second! Planck time is the smallest possible time, and Planck length is the smallest possible distance, so dividing one by the other should give the speed of light, and indeed it does (Note 1). The speed of light then, like every wave, is limited by the speed of the medium that transmits it, which here is the quantum network.
The term speed of light is a misnomer, as it assumes light is a thing that sets its own pace but it isn’t. It is a wave, a disturbance spreading in a medium that defines its speed, and a wave of processing spreading on a network is the same, so light always travels at the same speed in space because the quantum network is the same everywhere. What we call the speed of light is then a property not of light but of how fast the medium of space passes on processing, so it should be called the speed of space.
Why then does light slow down when it moves in water? Again, our particle bias assumes that it moves in the water, so its medium is water, and if it moves in glass, its medium is glass, but if it moves in space we call it a wave of nothing! This is inconsistent so in this model, light has the same medium in every case. If the medium of light in empty space is the quantum network, it is also the medium of light in water or glass. Light then doesn’t slow down because water is a denser medium, but because the quantum network is busy generating the water as well. It follows that light slows down in water for the same reason that a game slows down when your computer is busy.
Light moves at different speeds through different materials because they slow down the quantum network, but the network still processes photons in sequence, one after another, like cars in a queue. Each point handles the photon it has before accepting the next, so even if it runs slower, they still arrive in lock-step order. This maintains causality as if one photon could overtake another, we could see an object arrive before it left! Causality requires photons to stay in sequence and the quantum engine rigorously maintains this.
Note 1: The speed of light c = LP/TP, where LP is a Planck length of 1.616×10−35meters and TP is Planck time of 5.39 × 10−44 of a second. This gives the speed of light as 299,792,458 meters per second (see here).
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