Scientifically is it possible we may discover something faster than light any time in future?
In: Planetary Science
What you think of as the speed of light is really the speed limit of the universe and light is the only thing we know of that can go that fast. The theoretical ways to faster than the speed of light involve creating a bubble that compresses space around it and riding collapsed spacetime like a surfer. But the creation of the bubble and the removal of the bubble are both very likely impossible, but its hard to say for sure because we don’t even have a mechanism for how we could possible create one
Possible, but very unlikely, for two reasons.
First, the more mass something has, the more energy it takes to move it. Photons have no mass and move at 300,000 km/s. To exceed that speed, with our current understanding, would require either negative mass or infinite energy.
Second, the speed of light is really the speed of causality. Any effect can only be the result of a cause that is within 300,000 km per second since it happened. If that did not hold, effects would happen before the things that caused them.
Again, maybe one day we will discover that the universal speed limit isn’t what we think it is now (it wasn’t that long ago that we thought nothing could be smaller than atoms), but it will require a fundamental shift in what we know about the universe.
Things with more mass are tough to move. It’s harder to move a boulder and easier to move a marble, right?
Anything with *no mass at all* moves as quickly as it’s possible to move.
Light has no mass.
Our current understanding of physics is nothing can move faster than light through space, but that you might theoretically be able to get from point A to point B faster than light by warping spacetime, either with worm holes as a shortcut or with an Alcubierre drive which works like a Star Trek warp drive that pushes a bubble of stationary spacetime around faster than light while you are technically standing still inside that bubble (traveling without moving if you will).
That’s all extremely theoretical though and we have no idea if it would actually work.
I’m no physic, but as far as i know, the fabric of the space-time moves faster than light, that’s why “galaxies far far away are moving away at a speed faster than light”.
But in this space-time (aka our universe) nothing can move faster than light (and gravitational waves)
There are hypothetical particles call tachyons that can travel faster than the speed of light (in fact, if they exist, they have to travel faster than the speed of light). The less kinetic energy they have, the faster they would travel, and if they had zero kinetic energy, they would travel at an infinite speed. They would have as much trouble decelerating to the speed of light as we have accelerating to it.
But, if they exist, we would almost certainly not be able to detect them. So while the math of our best physics theories say they could exist, they probably don’t exist, and even if they did, we’d likely never be able to detect them.
Matter and information are limited by spacetime, and one of those limits is *c*. Full stop, end of story. No matter or information can exceed this. It’s like asking, “what happened before time began?”
That said, you could totally set up an apparatus to sweep a focused laser beam projected onto a distant surface and sweep the beam across the projected surface and the *apparent* speed of that projected dot would exceed *c*, but you see there’s nothing physical with mass moving across the projected surface. Think of shining a laser at the moon; you could sling a dot across the width of the moon with the flick of your wrist!
Nope, this has been proven incredibly thoroughly in a very wide range of tests. Nothing that has mass can even reach the speed of like while travelling through space and no object or information (regardless of mass) can travel faster than light.
Something really interesting happens if you try anyway.
Lets take something REALLY small and light like an electron or a proton and try to make it go faster and faster, like in a particle accelerator. At first it’ll be relatively easy, however, once the particle reaches a decent fraction of the speed of light, you’ll notice that for every joule of energy you put in to speed it up you’re getting smaller and smaller increases in.
This energy isn’t vanishing or being lost due to inefficiencies. Instead, it’s being converted into mass. The proton or electron actually gets heavier as it gets closer to the speed of light. This happens exponentially as you get closer to the speed of light. It works out that to actually reach the speed of light would mean making the proton have an infinite mass, requiring infinite energy to make it happen (and probably destroying the universe in the process).
There ARE ways to make it appear like something is going faster than light, but they don’t violate this rule.
For example, light slows down when going through stuff like air, glass or water. So some small particles can move faster than light, within those materials (this is [Cherenkov radiation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation#)). Another way this could happen is by shining a laser at the moon then flicking your wrist really fast, the dot on the moon appears to move faster than light, however, that isn’t an object, it just looks like one. Finally, there’s funky stuff to do with spacetime, like how the universe is expanding so some very distant galaxies are moving away from us at faster than the speed of light, or how the theoretical (but in practice impossible) Alcubierre warp drive lets you move “faster than light” by encapsulating you in a bubble of spacetime and making that bubble move faster than light.
Speed of light is the guardian of causality in our universe. That means that if one event influences another, anyone anywhere will see them in the correct order.
Some things can ***technically*** be faster than light, but those things will not transmit information, participate in causality.
Examples of of such phenomena include:
The movement of shadows, since they’re an absence of light, they can “travel” at any speed.
“Phase speed”, i.e. the speed at which wave crests travel. You can add two waves of light in such a ways that their crests move at any speed you want. But that’s not the same as the photons moving, so it doesn’t break anything.
Quantum entanglement. For reasons I’m not qualified to explain, “spooky action at a distance” is faster than light, but isn’t capable of transmitting information, and therefore it doesn’t break anything.
This is actually an interesting topic because while no information including physical objects including energy can travel faster than light there are things that can shadows, for example that’s okay though because a shadow is not a physical object as it conveys no information.
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