c as an Effect

For more than a century, physics has treated the speed of light c as a universal constant and thecausal structure of spacetime as a geometric consequence of that constant. This paper reversesthat relationship. Within the Cohesion Unified Field Theory (Cohesion UFT), c is not a primitiveconstant, not a causal boundary, and not a geometric postulate. It is an effect — the emission speedof recursional friction in a pressure-bound medium. Light is not fundamental; it is the organizedemission of slip events in a recursion under pressure. Temperature is the entropy cadence of thoseslip events. The paper proposes the identity c = T — understood not as a dimensional equationbetween a speed and a temperature, but as a mechanical identity in the naturalized units of therecursion, where both quantities reduce to the slip cadence 1/tcoh(P) that the pressure axiom fixes.There are no vacuum conditions in this account, only lower-pressure layers of the same recursionsubstrate. The apparent constancy of c in general relativity is presented as the high-symmetrylimit of a density-dependent propagation law, and the geometric role of c in relativity is treated as abookkeeping convenience rather than a physical primitive. The paper derives a variable c directlyfrom the pressure axiom, identifies light as the emission of recursional friction, and establishestemperature as the entropy cadence of slip.Keywords: variable speed of light, pressure axiom, recursional friction, entropy cadence, slipemission, Cohesion UFT, density-dependent propagation.