When Apep Met Quantum Light

What if gravity, the great invisible force we’ve trusted to keep our feet on the earth and the stars in the sky, isn’t what we thought it was?

What if it’s not some intrinsic force baked into the bones of the universe, but a byproduct... a shimmering afterglow... the echo of light weaving itself into matter, again and again, through timeless transactions of becoming?

This is not just a poetic metaphor any more! It’s a radical theory emerging from the quantum edges of modern physics.

Physicists Ruth Kastner and Andreas Schlatter propose something extraordinary: that gravity is not fundamental, as Einstein’s general relativity suggests. But, instead, they offer that it emerges from electromagnetic interactions at the quantum level moments when charged particles exchange photons, these are the tiny packets of light that carry the electromagnetic force.

In their framework, known as the Relativistic Transactional Interpretation (RTI), these quantum exchanges do more than move energy, they create the very events that stitch together space and time. Every photon absorbed or emitted gives rise to a pair of spacetime events. Through countless such interactions, the fabric of our own reality is woven.

Now pause!

Breathe that in! Really think about it!

In this vision, spacetime is not the stage, it's the song!

A melody emerging from a deeper, more primal dance of particles and light, of energy and entropy.

And here’s where the ancient memory in our bones begins to stir...

Because the Egyptians knew something…

They didn’t speak of particles and photons, but they told stories, sacred, coded, cosmological stories. Of Apep, the serpentine force of chaos who waits in the Duat to devour Ra’s solar barque.

Apep was not the devil. He was not evil. He was primordial entropy, the churning, formless potential beneath creation. The darkness that makes light meaningful.

Ra’s journey through the underworld was not about destruction, it was about integration. Order must meet chaos and emerge sovereign, again and again.

In Kastner and Schlatter’s theory, gravity arises from entropy driven photon exchanges, not unlike Ra exchanging light for passage through the coils of Apep.

So, what if Apep wasn’t a monster to defeat, but a metaphor for the quantum unknown? The dark matrix through which all things must pass to become?

What if the serpent wasn’t guarding death, but midwifing emergence?

Just as these physicists propose that the cosmos forms itself through interactions, the ancients offered rituals of renewal, remembering that order is not given, it is made, lovingly, consistently and soulfully from the dance with chaos.

There is such poetry in that symmetry!

Where modern science begins to describe entropic emergence, and ancient wisdom sang of divine becoming!

Where physicists speak of photons giving rise to spacetime, our ancestors spoke of Ra’s light giving rise to life!

And maybe both are true.

Maybe it is through the very tangle of disorder and light that gravity, love, meaning, and form arise?

And we, too, are not fixed entities, but ever-emerging, ever-creating, ever-weaving ourselves out of dark and light.

We are not here to escape chaos.

We are here to redeem it!