A Rational Cosmology: The Compatibility of Observations About Light with the View of Light as a Relationship

Essay XLVI

This is Essay XLVI of Mr. Stolyarov's series, "A Rational Cosmology," which seeks to present objective, absolute, rationally grounded views of terms such as universe, matter, volume, space, time, motion, sound, light, forces, fields, and even the higher-order concepts of life, consciousness, and volition. See the index of all the essays in "A Rational Cosmology" here.

We have previously identified light as a relationship between its source entity and its target entity.

To specify what sort of relationship light is, ubiquitous observation can add that it varies inversely with distance (which physics has verified to be an inverse square relation), that it is capable of varying both in type and intensity, and that it is the relationship which allows observers to see entities.

Unlike sound, however, light does not require the observer, even though the observer requires light. The Sun continues to illuminate the entirety of the entities of Earth, even if a particular observer happens to be indoors and thus lack view of the Sun, or the vast majority of entities which are affected by it.

The observer is merely a third party to the relationship, and his involvement in it (through the act of visual perception) is rendered possible by the primary interaction between the source and target entities.

Interactions among entities not spatially adjacent to one another are not, by the way, either inconceivable or in any manner philosophically excluded. A relationship only implies that multiple entities affect each other's qualities, not that they contact each other physically.

Indeed, physics has demonstrated that numerous "forces at a distance," exist, including magnetism and the electrostatic force, which need not necessarily imply contact between source and target.

Light, though not a force in itself, can nevertheless be classified as a relationship between two spatially separate entities without committing either a philosophical or a physical error.