It’s helpful to flip this on its head.
Nothing can go faster than light, because light travels at the fastest possible speed for any object because it has no mass – it weighs nothing.
The heavier something is, the slower it has to travel. Light travels at the maximum possible speed, as it weighs nothing.
The heavier something is, the more energy it needs to speed it up. That’s why it’s easy to throw a tennis ball, but harder to push a car.
The amount of energy that it takes to move something heavy goes up exponentially – meaning that to push something that has weight as fast as light would take more energy than can exist in the universe (we think).
Photons have no mass, so they travel as fast as anything can go. Anything that weighs something, by definition, cannot go that fast as there’s nothing that could push it any faster.
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