Why/how is light the fastest thing in the universe and nothing else can be faster?

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Why have we ruled out the possibility of finding something faster when we’ve only scratched the surface of space exploration and understanding?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

As I understand it, it’s not so much that light is the fastest thing, but that it travels instantaneously… to itself.

It’s all about special relativity. The faster something moves in relation to you, the slower time goes for that object in relation to your time. So if you watch something is moving at .9c (c is the speed of light) for an hour, it will only be half an hour for that object. If you watch it go .99c for an hour, it will only experience 1 minute. If you watch it go .999c, it will only experience 1 second. And so on. (These numbers are wrong, btw, and just used to make an easy example. The math is not that easy to do so I skipped it.)

The closer you get to light speed, the less time YOU experience while travelling. The rest of the universe sees you take centuries to travel across the galaxy at .99999c, but you only age a week.

So what happens when you hit 1c? Well, you can’t, because you have rest mass (which is a whole other thing). But if you did? You wouldn’t experience any time at all. You would be at your destination immediately (to you).

And since velocity is simple (distance/time), if you travel any distance but take no time to do that, your velocity is infinite.

And since you can’t go faster than infinitely fast, and (to you) infinitely fast LOOKS LIKE light speed to everyone else, that’s the limit.

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