The way I think I understand it, even if we had some “element 0” like in mass effect to keep a starship from reaching unmanageable mass while accelerating, faster than light travel still wouldn’t be possible because you’d be violating causality somehow, but every explanation I’ve read on why leaves me bamboozled.
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So I can walk at a speed of 5mph. If I am on a train that is going 30mph, I can walk forward and be going 35mph, even though I am still only capable of walking 5mph. You would say that I am walking 5mph in the reference frame of the train, and I am walking 35mph in the reference frame of the ground
In physics, we call the math that lets us describe the same motion in two different reference frames a coordinate transform. At low speeds, the coordinate transform is fairly simple (5mph+30mph=35mph). At high speeds, it becomes more complicated, to the point that if something is traveling faster than light in one reference frame, that is equivalent to saying it is traveling backwards in time in another reference frame.
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