A video guide to a better conception of reality

Interactions, horizons, entropy and entanglement shape the cosmos

9 min readJan 8, 2025

Over the years, I’ve compiled a list of interesting materials (websites, articles, books, videos…) on various theories and ideas related to my own understanding of the universe. I’ve decided to list here the most relevant videos I’ve found, arranged in a way that leads from one key concept to the next. I hope you find them as interesting and inspiring as I did:

Peter Russell — The World from Light’s Point of View

Photons experience emission and absorption at once.

It may not be the best idea to start with a guru of spirituality and meditation, but this video is surprisingly clear in giving a straightforward explanation of why the speed of light must somehow imply some kind of instantaneity. (Please, forgive the one-minute digression on consciousness at 09:20, or ponder why consciousness would be so similar to light.)

Fraser Cain — Does Light Experience Time?

Photons do not experience time.

Consider that each photon in the CMB has traveled through the universe for 13.8 billion years, and yet, from its perspective, not a single moment of time has passed. Photons can travel through spacetime for billions of years and still experience no time has elapsed when detected.

PBS Space Time

The True Nature of Matter and Mass

Matter is confined energy.

Excellent explanation of how matter can be modeled as a photon box, how inertial mass is just confined energy, how acceleration causes photon pressure (which equals mass), and how this acceleration is equivalent to gravity.

The Origin of Matter and Time

All phenomena consist of light-like interactions.

Fantastic explanation of how things are self-contained sets of interactions, which define their boundaries and properties. Things are evolving arrangements of many light-like paths.

Sabine Hossenfelder — Time Stops at the Speed of Light. What Does that Mean?

Spacetime diagrams help us visualize and understand interactions.

Nice explanation of spacetime diagrams, worldlines, the difference between coordinate and proper time, and how all light-like paths imply zero proper time regardless of their length or interval through spacetime.

Veritasium — The Simple Math Problem That Revolutionized Physics

The principle of least action underlies all phenomena.

Excellent video about the development of the concept of action, and how the principle of least action always applies in nature. When action (m·v·s) is written in Planck units, we get the value of the reduced Planck constant (ħ = mp·c·lp), an invariant quantity that all interactions must satisfy. Thus, the principle of least action is closely related to the Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principles, which all phenomena must satisfy regardless of the observer’s reference frame.

Andrew Mitchell — Classical physics derived from quantum mechanics: Feynman Path Integral

Classical physics emerges from quantum principles.

Excellent illustration of how different methods in physics (Huygens’ principle, quantum interference, Feynman’s path integral…) ultimately describe the same underlying principle (the principle of least action), shaping both quantum and classical physics. Uncertainty also shapes action for all observers, so nature is as always as efficient as possible, trying to maximize entropy with minimal action.

Carlo Rovelly — Relational Quantum Mechanics

Reality is not things, but connections

Interactions define reality.

Brief summary of the relational interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and how reality, at the fundamental level, is not based on things, but on relations. Objects (and processes) are just ensembles of interactions.

How to be a Realist without Wave-Function Realism

Wave functions are not fundamental to the quantum world.

To observe is to interact, measurements are relations, and properties refer to interactions, not to the objects or processes they shape. All properties appear at the time of interaction, and are relevant only to the observer experiencing them. The wave function is a misleading concept. (You can skip the discussion after 42:30, they miss the point entirely.)

If you want to know more about Relational Quantum Mechanics, you can read the following book by Rovelli:

📕 Helgoland — Carlo Rovelli (2021) — A great book about Relational Quantum Mechanics, and how Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics, which predates Schrödinger’s wave functions, already contains everything we need to understand the quantum world.

Ruth E. Kastner — Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

Quantumland: The Land of Possibilities

Emitters and absorbers connect through interactions.

A one-minute explanation of how emitters and absorbers decide “outside spacetime” which interactions and exchanges to perform. (Remember: all light-like interactions involve zero proper time, so they are effectively instantaneous to themselves.)

Quantum Universe Properties

Interactions shape the spacetime structure itself.

Nice summary of the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and how it solves the measurement problem, gets rid of collapse, and explains the origin of Born’s rule by considering that emission and absorption are on equal footing. Conscious observers play no role, but absorbers are essential to define interactions (especially interesting remarks start at 20:40.)

Dr. Ruth Kastner and the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics

Relativity and gravity emerge from quantum exchanges.

Interview explaining the Transactional Interpretation, and how emitter and absorber are essential for a time-symmetric or “outside time” perspective. (I skipped most of the talk, as it describes TI concepts again, and went directly to the most interesting remarks at 52:15, which relate to the following videos on emergent gravity).

If you want to know more about the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, read Kastner’s book on how to understand the quantum world. It can really change the way you understand reality:

📕 Understanding Our Unseen Reality — Ruth E. Kastner (2015) — An awe inspiring book about the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and how emission and absorption are key to define every physical interaction.

Erik Verlinde — Emergent (or Entropic) Gravity

Entropic Gravity from Quantum Entanglement!

Entanglement and entropy define the force of gravity.

Interview on how gravity and other forces can be derived from a statistical, thermodynamic, or informational point of view. We live inside a black hole bounded by the cosmological horizon.

Fysica2015 — Opening & Erik Verlinde

Horizons and entropy are related to gravity and Dark Matter.

How the surface entropy on event horizons (cosmological, Rindler, black holes…) creates entropic forces that explain inertia, gravity and cosmological dynamics without Dark Matter or Dark Energy. (You can skip the introduction, Verlinde’s talk starts at 09:00.)

Emergence of Gravity from Quantum Information: a Progress Report

Entropic forces shape the universe.

Another great talk looking at the same concepts of how entanglement, entropy and temperature across surfaces and horizons relate to inertia or gravitational acceleration. Each point in space simply seeks equilibrium with the entire observable universe that is accessible from there.

If you want to know more about Entropic Gravity, read the seminal article from Verlinde:

📄 On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton — Erik Verlinde (2011) — Fascinating and very easy to read article on how gravity, inertia, and other forces can arise from thermodynamic considerations on two-dimensional surfaces.

Mike McCulloch — Quantised Inertia

How quantised inertia gets rid of dark matter

Event horizons cause Dark Matter and inertia.

How event horizons and information boundaries create a kind of casimir effect at the cosmological scale that explains inertia, gravity and cosmological dynamics without Dark Matter. (Quantised Inertia is also known as “Modified Inertia by a Hubble-Scale Casimir Effect”, or MiHsC). Again, every point in space is seeking balance with the universe, and it seems we might be able to exploit this fact in new technologies.

I only include McCulloch’s theory because it’s strikingly similar to Verlinde’s, in that he claims that event horizons are related to inertia and the mysterious forces of the Dark Sector. But he also claims that we can engineer event horizons to generate reactionless thrust, and that is a bit of a stretch for conventional physics.

For my part, I’m not sure that we can take advantage of event horizons, since I claim that observation limits and boundaries are, precisely, a necessity of nature in order to keep the observer’s reality consistent within constraints. But I also claim that aware observers are capable of finding patterns in nature that allow them to steer reality towards the most unlikely outcomes, so who knows…

If you want to learn more about Quantised Inertia, you can read McCulloch’s first book on the subject, that I found more accessible than his latest book:

📕 Physics From The Edge — Mike McCulloch (2014) — A nice book explaining how humanity has understood inertia and gravity throughout history, and how the lack of information beyond event horizons could be the cause of inertia and explain the effects attributed to Dark Matter.

Conclusion

You’ll find references to all these topics scattered throughout my writings. The conception of reality that I present there evolved gradually over the years, as I pondered the logical consequences of some undeniable facts of nature while reading about similar concepts and ideas.

From then on, whenever I stumble upon a new theory, discovery or experiment, I always approach these findings from the vantage point of the core fundamental truths of nature, and they always provide better explanations, reveal new key insights, or reinforce those I’ve uncovered.

It all started in mid-2015, when I accidentally came across a website that attempted to describe the world from the point of view of photons by removing all free space. At that very moment I understood that spacetime does not exist for massless quanta, that the zero proper time they experience at the speed of light makes them equivalent to a timeless event with no spacetime properties while being coherent with the conditions of the spacetime interval they represent to others, and that Special Relativity itself provides a dual perspective of light-like interactions as instantaneous action/reaction events that could explain entanglement naturally, so the full ER=EPR conjecture would actually read c=ER=EPR, and from there all quantum weirdness could be explained.

The consequences of this line of thinking were monumental, triggering a “chain reaction” of connected ideas that led me to the startling conclusions you can find in my articles:

It seems that the same year I first wondered about the true meaning of the speed of light, Ruth E. Kastner published her book on the Transactional Interpretation. When I learned about it a few years later, I was struck by the similarities between my findings and its main ideas, which presented spacetime as an emergent phenomenon created by all the transactions of energy in a quantum realm “outside spacetime.” A bit later, I also came across the Relational Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, which also claims that what really exists are not objects but relations, and that wave functions, changing in space and time, are more misleading than useful in describing the quantum world.

You can see that both conceptual frameworks are equivalent to considering the logical consequences of Special Relativity exactly at the speed of light, where the absorption event (the observer) becomes as relevant as the emission event (the observed) in shaping interactions. All three interpretations propose that each energy exchange is just the actual realization of one of many possible transactions between emitters and absorbers, satisfying the physical constraints that allow such an exchange, and that there are no unique or isolated events in the universe, since everything that happens must be related to something else in the past, so that the observer and the observed are always paired by the light-like intervals that connect them through spacetime.

All these ideas were so fruitful that I decided to analyze all the puzzles of Quantum Mechanics from this standpoint, and to my surprise I was able to find intuitive explanations for all the quirky, convoluted behaviors of the quantum world. Later, I also attempted to uncover the true meaning of other fundamental constants, which led me to find out the underlying relations that they must satisfy at all scales and times, explaining the origin of all observable limits (from the Planck scale to the Cosmological Horizon, including black holes), and potentially solving all cosmological mysteries related to gravity and the Dark Sector, which would arise from how interactions have to both satisfy the global or absolute constraints that shape the universal invariant constants as well as the subjective or relative reference frame of each observer, much like how Verlinde’s theory relates the emergence of entropic forces to the nature of the information available across different surfaces and event horizons.

In the end, I think this viewpoint works correctly because it uncovers the same insights that Kastner’s transactional interpretation, Rovelli’s relational interpretation, or Verlinde’s emergent interpretation:

Absorption is a fundamental part of any energy exchange.
Both emission and absorption are required to define any transaction.
Phenomena are based not on properties, but on constraints and relations.
All the massless carriers we depict as traveling through the universe at the speed of light are, at the same time, the instantaneous entangled connections that create the spacetime structure itself.
Reality unfolds according to constraints, and what unfolds further constrains reality.
The universe is not first elements and laws, then conservation and consistency checks, but first conservation and consistency checks, then elements and laws.

Every observable, unobservable, or mysterious feature of the universe is defined by the possibility or impossibility of different exchanges taking place at different rates between different regions of spacetime.