Scientifically is it possible we may discover something faster than light any time in future?
In: Planetary Science
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.
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