If you think light has a speed, ask yourself where the energy to speed up comes from when it exits a denser medium, such as glass.
Hint, it is a medium dependant rate of induction of the aether. Light doesn't travel or has a speed.
Discussion
This post and another you made the other day about aether are intriguing. I have no familiarity with the concept, though. Where can I read up on it?
Ken Wheeler has some interesting insights into it, and there is a lot of reading material also linked in the description of his videos.
The other option would be to go to the sources of much of the research, usual suspects like Tesla. But it is a lot to dig into if you don't have an overview or understand a lot of the terminology, which is where I was about 6 months ago with all of this. The books about it are quite technical, especially when comparing the atomistic approach - The Lightness of Being by Frank Wilczek is a good book which talks about unifying the forces, which is impossible if one ignores the aether.
All photons, through all mediums, travel at the speed of light. In a denser medium there are more interactions between photons and atoms. But the photons themselves always travel at the speed of light, no speeding up or slowing down.
Analogy: Two people can run at the exact same speed, but the one that has to jump through barriers and take detours will lose to the person who runs in a straight line.
The "speed of light" changes depending on the medium, just like sound has a different rate depending on the medium. With light, this is the refractive index. The speed of light in a medium is inversely proportional to the refractive index of the medium, and it varies depending on the medium.
The speed of a photon never changes. Light itself never slows down or speeds up. The average speed measured over a set distance in a medium will of course vary, but the speed of the photon will always be constant.
Sound is not the same as light. Sound needs a medium to vibrate through, thereby changing its speed. Light does not.
Virtual particles and photons nothing more than concepts, they don't exist.
You're looking at it through the (incorrect) lens of atomism, when we have an aether which was proven a long time ago.
"Light can be nothing other than a sound wave in the aether." - Nikola Tesla
Tesla and the fathers of field theory all understood this, and without their understanding we wouldn't have an electrical grid. Light doesn't travel, it is the rate of induction of the aether.
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I’m highly skeptical of this. Just because Tesla was hugely influential in the field of electro physics, does not mean he was correct about everything. The Aether has never been detected in any way shape or form; it’s not observable or measurable or detectable, like it doesn’t exist. Certainly it’s not set in stone that an Aether does not exist, but no one has been able to prove its existence.
There’s no need for any luminiferous medium for light to travel through to explain how light works.
Understandably so, I was too when I first started diving into the idea a few years ago.
MMX proved the aether exists, and all the inventions like the AC motor were developed using theory that stems from the existence of aether. It wasn't just Tesla; Faraday, Heaviside, Steinmetz, Maxwell, Dollard, and many more all knew it to be true.
"The Aether has never been detected in any way shape or form; it’s not observable or measurable or detectable, like it doesn’t exist."
That's pretty much how dark matter is described, and it is where I believe relativity dies. It cannot progress in any meaningful way without the aether.
The medium is why light exists at all, since it is the a disturbance of the medium itself. Light stops illuminating once it is no longer propagating through the medium. That is what makes frequency and vibration key, because they are the means of manipulating the aether in order to manifest energy.
You will have loosen the grip on some of your existing beliefs in order to entertain this theory from this perspective.
This was one of the first books that got me into the topic:
Still skeptical, but I’ll have a read/check out the book you mentioned 👍🏻