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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Some things others haven’t mentioned yet: this maximum speed limit has some weird properties as well. There is a variable called the Lorentz factor that can account for how things get harder to accelerate as you approach the speed of light. This is an issue because it means to be *at* the speed of light you’d need to actually have infinite energy (since we have mass unlike photons). Also, as something accelerates close to the speed of light, time slows down for the person accelerating relative to the people not accelerating, an effect called time dilation. This is because of another weird effect light has which is that it is always observed as the same speed no matter the speed of the observer. This is counterintuitive because when you think of for example a person running and throwing a baseball, you can add the speeds of the person and the throw together to get the speed of the ball. However this actually doesn’t happen to light. Even if we were going extremely fast, light would always seem to be going much faster because it kinda slows down time in a way in order to keep that rule
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