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

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.

The objection might be raised to this model of light as a relationship at a distance that it does not account for such apparently simple physical principles as the reflection and refraction of light, since, it might be claimed, only entities can reflect and refract.

However, in order for all the known regularities concerning reflection and refraction to be true, light need not be an entity in itself. The Law of Reflection, for example, essentially states, "If a source entity is located at a certain angle of incidence from the target entity, it will also exhibit the relationship of light with any proximate entity that would be located at an angle from the target entity symmetric to the angle of incidence with respect to the normal line to the surface." This law merely states at which positions the relationship of light will affect entities, and how it will affect them.

As for refraction, the only reason why such a phenomenon is even possible is because light has entered a certain medium, i.e., has obtained target entities which have their qualities altered by the light-emitting source.

One of the alterations in the qualities of the medium which is the target entity is the appearance of a bent "beam," which is not independent of the medium, or superimposed upon it, but rather a visual manifestation of the relationship between the source entity and the target medium. Neither phenomenon, to be explicable, inherently requires the model of light as consisting of particles in itself.

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