A Rational Cosmology: The Impossibility of Non-Local Effects

Essay LIX

This is Essay LIX 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.

Before continuing our discussion of fields, it will be fitting to explore a broader concept which will then be applied to further analysis. This concept is at the root of nearly all the fallacies which empiricist-positivist physicists perpetuate about fields; it is the assumption that such a phenomenon as a non-local effect could conceivably exist.

A non-local effect is one that involves not only a limited number of participating entities, but the entirety of the entities in the universe (and, in the mistaken view of empiricist-positivist cosmologists, the universal "fabric" in which these entities exist). An entity which exhibits such an effect is presumed to thereby affect everything else that exists, instantaneously and simultaneously.

However, as will be recalled from "The Existence of Change and the Necessity of Time," all change requires time to take place, and any effect an entity creates implies some change in the entities it affects. A non-local effect, concerning everything as it by definition must, must also therefore occur instantaneously, so as to encompass the entire universe at once.

Thus, a non-local effect presumes the occurrence of vast changes of a universal scope without any means for the changes to occur, i.e., the accumulation of time. We therefore know the idea to be false, since any change, and therefore any process, requires some amount of time, however small, to accomplish, and the more entities a given process will affect in the same manner, the more time will be thereby expended in the bringing about of the effect, since the entity originating the process must spend some amount of time affecting each of the entities which the process targets.