Every few years, physics appears to flirt with transgression. A new experiment, a novel measurement, a light curve that seems to arrive too early or decay too fast — and the headlines whisper the same forbidden phrase: faster than light. The announcement is always accompanied by the same ritual gestures: a hushed fascination, a faint sense of cosmic impropriety, followed by a hasty reassurance that no physical laws have been broken.
But the real drama is not physical; it is linguistic. “Superluminal propagation” is less an event in nature than a scandal in discourse — the moment when the metaphors that sustain physics momentarily lose their grip. The universe does not blush at such reports; only our descriptions do.
Light speed is not simply a number; it is the measure that organises modern physics’ sense of order itself. It defines the scale of simultaneity, causality, and even possibility. To exceed it is to exit the architecture of intelligibility that physics has built around it. The phrase “nothing can travel faster than light” functions less as an empirical claim than as a grammatical rule of the cosmos — a constraint on how motion, signal, and event can be said to relate.
Hence the drama. “Superluminal propagation” does not suggest that nature has misbehaved, but that language has. The scandal of speed is the scandal of metaphor: that a conceptual system framed in terms of movement through space should find itself unable to describe relations that do not conform to movement at all.
The very terms of physics betray their figurative origins. Speed presupposes a traversable distance and a measurable interval. Propagation presumes a medium that carries something from here to there. Limit implies an external boundary, a frontier to be tested. These metaphors stabilise the world as a scene of discrete entities and causal transmissions — an ontology of things moving across an empty stage. Within such a frame, light speed becomes the ultimate stage direction: “no actor may exit faster than this.”
When “superluminal” effects appear, the audience gasps because the play seems to violate its own script. But perhaps what we witness is not defiance of law, only a miscasting of relation. The cosmos has not changed character; our staging has momentarily collapsed under its own metaphors.
To treat this properly, we would need to ask not what is moving faster than light, but what construal makes it appear so. For every scandal in physics hides a misalignment of meaning: a case where relational simultaneity is mistaken for sequential motion, where alignment is narrated as travel. The scandal of speed, then, is the scandal of our insistence that all relation must be measured in miles per second.
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