Questions and Answers

The Speed of Light

It has been asked "why is the speed of light what it is?", and some answers have been put forward. I would like to suggest another approach to the problem.

If we go back to the famous equation derived from Einstein’s mathematics and start from there, we might find a clue.

E = mc**2 (E equals m times c squared)

The energy in an amount of matter depends only on the mass and the speed of light.

Which says that you can convert matter into energy (and vice versa) using the speed of light as the conversion factor.

Changing the formula around and we get that

c = square root of ( E / m )

which says that the speed of light is dependant on the mass of a particle and the energy it contains.

If we take the mass of the smallest particle of matter, the hydrogen atom and consider the amount of energy it contains we can work out what the speed of light is.

So the question becomes "why is the mass of the hydrogen atom what it is and why does it contain the amount of energy that it does?". We can add questions as to why the charge on an electron is what it is and why the gravitational constant, g, has a certain value. And why do all the so-called "universal constants" have the values that they do?

And the answer to these questions must lie in the conditions that existed at the time of the Big Bang.

Could they have been different? Well it is very easy to imagine the mass of an atom being different, but could it actually have happened? At the time of the Big Bang everybody was somewhere else doing other things, there are no records of what conditions were actually like at the time and the details have slipped by unrecorded.

There may well be other kinds of universes where the mass of an atom is different or the charge on an electron is different or the gravitational constant is different, but we may never know the answer to that. Of course in the future some clever physicists may be able to simulate a Big Bang under laboratory conditions.

But until then we shall just have to accept that the speed of light (and the other "universal constants") is what it is because of the conditions that existed when the universe was created at the time of the Big Bang.

Brian Fraser