Created by: roberto.c.alfredo in physics on Jul 4, 2025, 6:42 PM
1. What Exactly Are Light Cones?
When you turn on a flashlight in a dark room, the light spreads out in a cone of illumination. Now imagine that effect on a cosmic scale with the universal speed limit: light itself. In relativity, these cones mark the boundaries of the causal past and causal future of every event.
Formally, an event is just a point in spacetime with coordinates \((t, x, y, z)\). The light emitted from that point travels along surfaces that form cones, clearly separating which events can influence it or be influenced by it.
2. Simple Mathematical Structure of the Light Cone
Recall our spacetime interval: $$ s^2 = c^2 t^2 - x^2 - y^2 - z^2 $$ The light cones are the regions satisfying:
- \(s^2 = 0\): lightlike trajectories.
- \(s^2 > 0\): inside the cone, timelike trajectories.
- \(s^2 < 0\): outside the cone, spacelike trajectories.
Visually, these cones are the surfaces traced out by light emitted at the central event, neatly partitioning spacetime into causal regions.
3. Past, Future, and Causality: What’s Causally Possible?
- Causal past (lower cone): all events that could have influenced the present.
- Causal future (upper cone): all events that can be influenced by the present.
- Non-causal region (outside the cone): events that can neither influence nor be influenced, since doing so would require exceeding \(c\).
This is the physical guarantee of cause-and-effect order in the universe. No observer will ever see events flipped in time, avoiding classic time-travel paradoxes.