In the grand body of the universe and even our own solar system the speed of light is incredibly slow on the cosmic scale. Why does it have this speed limit ? It is theoretically possible to go faster than light ? Or is light just the fastest thing we have observed thus far ?
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As you travel faster, your experience of time slows for you and you become more massive – meaning you need even more energy to go faster. You need more and more energy as you get closer and closer to this ‘maximum speed’ where you need infinite energy and will be infinitely massive. So effectively you cannot get to that ‘maximum speed’.
The exception to this is if you have no mass – like light. Light *only* travels at that speed and cannot travel any slower of faster. It also experiences no time. So a particle of light can spend billions of years crossing the universe from our perspective but from its perspective it is instantaneous.
All of this strangeness comes from a deeper rule that says everyone must experience the same laws of physics regardless of their speed relative to each other. This was the rule Einstein applied and created the Theory of Relativity. Before his theory everyone was really puzzled as to why the speed of light seemed to be the same regardless if we were travelling toward the light or away from it.
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