1. Why return to c?
The previous post treated c — the so‑called speed of light — as a structural constraint: an invariant that holds spacetime, mass, and energy together by forbidding incoherent descriptions. That framing already resists many familiar metaphysical excesses. But it still leaves one temptation intact: the sense that c names a deep feature of the universe, even if not a substance or signal.
From the perspective of relational ontology, that temptation also needs to be cut.
What follows is not a revision of the physics, but a re‑siting of its meaning. The question is no longer what does c correspond to in reality? but what kind of thing is an invariant, once meaning itself is understood as relational and construed?
2. Systems, not substances
Relational ontology begins from a simple refusal: there are no self‑standing entities whose properties are merely revealed by description. There are only systems — structured potentials — and their instantiations under particular perspectives.
Within this frame, spacetime itself is not a container in which events occur. It is a system of possible relations whose internal coherence depends on how distinctions are drawn. The introduction of an invariant speed does not uncover a hidden feature of this system; it defines the conditions under which the system can be coherently instantiated at all.
c is therefore not a fact about the universe. It is a constraint internal to a particular theoretical system — a rule governing how that system may be cut into phenomena.
3. Invariance as a condition of perspectival stability
In the earlier post, c was described as the factor that allows different descriptions to agree. Relational ontology sharpens this claim:
Agreement is not a correspondence between descriptions and an independent reality. It is a stability across perspectives within a shared system of meaning.
An invariant is not something that stays the same in the world. It is something that must stay the same for the system to remain intelligible under variation of perspective.
From this point of view, Lorentz invariance is not a discovery about spacetime “out there”. It is a coherence condition for a system that allows multiple inertial perspectives to be related without contradiction.
c functions precisely here: as the fixed relation that prevents the system from tearing when perspectives shift.
4. Mass–energy equivalence as a relational cut
Seen relationally, the equation E=mc² loses its air of ontological revelation. It does not tell us what mass really is. It articulates how two different construals of the same system — one privileging rest, the other motion — must be related if they are to be treated as instantiations of a single underlying potential.
Mass and energy are not substances awaiting unification. They are perspectives on the same system under different cuts. The factor of c² is not a magical conversion rate; it is the invariant that preserves identity across those cuts.
What is conserved here is not matter or energy as things, but co‑individuation across perspectives.
5. The mistake of ontological inflation (again)
From within a relational ontology, the familiar metaphysical moves appear in a new light. To say that spacetime “really is” four‑dimensional, or that mass “really is” energy, is not merely to overinterpret the physics. It is to misidentify the level at which the theory is operating.
Invariants belong to the theory of the system, not to the phenomena instantiated within it. Treating them as features of reality in itself collapses the distinction between structured potential and actualised event — precisely the collapse relational ontology is designed to resist.
c does not inhabit the world. It inhabits the conditions under which the world can be meaningfully described.
6. Why this matters
This shift may seem subtle, but its consequences are not. Once invariants are understood relationally:
the quantum–classical “transition” ceases to be an ontological puzzle
debates over collapse versus decoherence lose their metaphysical urgency
the fetishisation of mathematical formalisms is deflated without being dismissed
Physics remains exacting and difficult. What changes is the story we tell about what it has shown.
7. A closing cut
c is often treated as a cosmic speed limit, a deep constant written into the fabric of reality. From a relational ontological perspective, it is something quieter and more precise: a condition that allows a particular system of meaning to hold together under variation of perspective.
It is not what the universe is made of.
It is what we are not allowed to change if we want our descriptions to remain coherent.
And that, perhaps, is its real significance.
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