Less Light on Relativity please.

I was recently reading a book about Einstein's Special and General theories of relativity - which was rather good I may say. One of the conclusions I came to after reading it was that in the attempt to explain relativity, (setting aside the question of whether it is right or not) physicists create a problem in the minds of laymen by always defining c as 'the speed of light', when in fact there is nothing very special about light, except its familiarity. I am sure it does not mislead the professionals, but, for laypersons, it seems to give light some special place in the order of things - to privilege it in some way, which is really quite wrong. Gravity too is supposed to travel at c. All electro-magnetic waves; indeed all information is limited by c (much of it travels much more slowly in fact, especially when encountering dense matter). So, in a sense, c is the speed of reality - the speed with which existence makes itself known. There are, perhaps, two sorts of thing; matter - thingy things, that essentially stay put, and move about a little bit, but not very much compared with c, and also things like photons and neutrinos and gravitons which can only exist by moving at c.

Static things and fleeting things.

Or to put it another way, as if in answer to some of Kant's antinomies, the universe does in fact come with limits. Things may hypothetically be forever subdivided, and may be smaller and smaller, but in reality nothing can be smaller than the Planck length. The Planck length is, in effect, the reality of the colloquial "infinitely small". Similarly movement comes up against c, which is, in effect, the real form that "infinitely fast" takes. The time dilation effect of relativity (slowing down time on a ‘ship’ that moves closer and closer to c, relative to me) certainly makes something solid moving at c relative to me seem to behave in the way that you would expect something traveling infinitely fast in classical mechanics to behave.

There is nothing special about light, or its speed. Light just happens to be one of those things that is immediately distributed, as near as dammit, instantaneously, while the shining object sits motionless in the middle of the room.
To me, thinking of it that way made it seem somewhat less implausible.

By the way, if gravity is transmitted by gravitons, how do gravitons escape from black holes? And if they do not, how does a black hole exert its gravitational field? Whether or not it is gravitons, how does gravity escape from black holes?
© 2004 AJM