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- Embed this notice@bobbala @Escoffier @6gorillanbarsofjewsoap @Starprophet1 @TrevorGoodchild There's nothing magical about the speed of light.
Even Newton mused that it didn't make sense for gravity to act instantaneously between two rocks, one on the Earth and one on the moon. Despite his equation of gravitation. He intuited that something was wrong. That there should be a finite time for an effect to propagate from one point to another in the universe, however fast it might be.
And he was right. In one of Landau and Lifshitz's volumes, The Classical Theory of Fields. Vol. 2, I think, they start with the premise that the propagation of an effect is finite. And all of special relativity drops out from there. Using nothing but high school algebra. no calculus required.
Newton was that close 400 years before Einstein.
It's just empirically observed that the finite propagation speed is the same as the speed of light.
As far as I know there's no particular reason why that must be so. But I could just be ignorant in that regard.