When Light Breaks Frame: Superluminality as Metaphor: 2 The Architecture of Limit: How Physics Frames Its Boundaries

Every science needs a boundary condition — a place where the world ends and the theory begins. For modern physics, that condition is spelled c. The speed of light is not merely a constant; it is the keystone in the arch that holds the conceptual edifice together. Remove it, and the whole structure trembles.

What we rarely notice is how architectural the metaphor already is. Physics imagines its universe as a building with walls, floors, thresholds. Within it, the “limit” functions as both constraint and guarantee: the frame that prevents collapse. It tells every quantity how far it may go before language itself ceases to make sense.

To describe a limit, however, is to imagine something approaching it — a motion toward the forbidden edge. Hence, the limit silently installs a traveller: the object that might someday reach it, test it, exceed it. Even as physics insists that nothing can cross the light-speed boundary, it keeps conjuring an imagined pursuer racing ever closer. The limit becomes an invitation written in prohibition’s ink.

This architecture of limit depends on three metaphors so familiar we have forgotten they are metaphors at all: speed, signal, and medium.

• Speed presupposes separable entities and measurable distance: an actor and a stage.

• Signal turns relation into transaction: something sent, something received.

• Medium re-introduces substance as courier: a background that carries meaning across emptiness.

Together they compose an ontology of transmission — a cosmos that must communicate with itself in parcels of energy and time. The light-speed limit, then, is the grammatical ceiling that keeps this communicative architecture coherent.

What happens when “superluminal propagation” appears is not the shattering of a law but the exposure of this architecture’s joints. The supposed anomaly reminds us that “limit” is not a property of the universe but of a discourse that pictures the universe in certain ways. It marks the seam where metaphoric construction shows through the plaster.

If we were to redraw the blueprint, we might replace the architecture of limit with an architecture of alignment. Relation would no longer depend on traversal or transmission; simultaneity would not need to move. The universe would not be a building at all, but a choreography of co-position — systems reconfiguring their internal alignments rather than racing toward walls.

To see the frame is to realise that physics’ most sacred constant is also its most eloquent metaphor. The light-speed limit does not constrain the cosmos; it constrains how the cosmos may be spoken.