A Rational Cosmology: The Impossibility of Non-Local Effects

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.

Thus, a process which is to have some impact on every entity that exists will need to take an extremely long time to be completed, as compared to the time in which that process would affect only a single entity.

As soon as we admit that it would take time for a non-local effect to occur, we thereby admit that it must be a local effect! A given entity affects another, then another, then another, and so on for quite some time, and at every instant during which this process functions, the effect is quite local; only a limited set of entities has been affected, i.e., the entities which it is easiest for the process-originating entity to bring about changes in first.

It is true that some entities can, under certain circumstances, affect several others simultaneously and in parallel, as a light bulb will do to two objects the same distance from it, but every entity's resources with which to undertake this simultaneous effect are limited. While the light bulb's luminosity allows it to illuminate a large number of objects in its vicinity, its resources are not nearly of the amount to similarly illuminate every entity that exists.

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