I sort of get the idea of how nothing can go faster than the speed of light but it always bugged me in the back of my mind and seems like it shouldn’t be how the universe works
In: Physics
Your brain evolved to understand things that are about the right size to throw, and move about as fast as you can throw them. Those things are nice and linear and predictable.
Bigger things, smaller things, faster things, far away things are weird. They need math to understand how they work, and sometimes the math isn’t even enough. You rarely if ever see things moving that way, so it’s not going to make intuitive sense.
That said, the speed of light isn’t some specific value, it’s a fundamental property of the universe. It’s not just the speed of light, it’s the speed of anything that doesn’t have mass. It makes more sense to use the speed of light as a unit, and measure your speed as a fraction of it. And we kind of do, because our definition of the meter is a fraction of the speed of light.
The speed of light can’t be faster or slower, because it scales all of our physics that works near that speed. It’s like asking what if we made the spaces on the Monopoly board bigger, you’d still move seven spaces when you roll a seven. You wouldn’t notice the difference. What matters is how your speed compares to the speed of light. And most of the time you’re so much slower that it doesn’t affect you and you’re back in the comfortable linear domain of stuff you can throw.
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