I could never figure out why the speed of light was supposed to be impossible to breach. It's just a speed, ain't it?
Edit: Nevermind. Got to thinking about the laws of conservation of energy and just before my mind exploded I remembered why. Something to do with light = energy, energy is needed to propel, and since there's no such thing as perpetual motion there's no
conventional way it can be done.
It'd suck, though, to walk in on your wife cheating on you with yourself from a couple hours ago.
Yeah. Photons are massless, they're all "E" and no "m". So the instant you create one, it squirts off like a watermellon seed at
c, but it can't go any faster than that (or slower, in a vacuum at least, either.)
If you were on a space ship travelling at 99.9% of
c and stood on it's nose and shined a flashlight in front of you, the photons would still look to be travelling away from you at
c, and to an observer in a stationary reference frame, the photons you shot off the nose of your ship would also arrive at
c as well, but they'd express the difference in potential energy through a higher frequency, and the light would be severely blue-shifted, maybe even x-rays or into the gamma.
And yes, no material object can ever be accellerated to
c either, just very close. Because a material object has mass, instead of how a photon emitted from relatavistic moving object gains or loses energy through frequency respective to a stationary reference frame, a material object gains more mass.
So as you start approaching exponentialy closer to
c, you mass more, and it takes a commensurately larger energy increase to accelerate you further, and it keeps on increasing at an exponential rate, to the point that after 99.9999----9% whatever, of
c there isn't enough energy in all the Universe to push a physical massed object, no matter how small to 100% of
c, much less beyond it.
There are potential loopholes. While mass can't move at
c or beyond it, it's been demonstrated, at least mathematically, that pieces of space-time themselves can be moved about at rates faster than
c from the perspective of a stationary reference frame. Physicist Miguel Alcubierre postulated that a region of space with a gravity well in front of it, and a negative anti-gravity hill behind it could carry a ship or mass riding motionless within a piece of space-time along at speeds greater than
c.
However, there are nearly insurmountable physics and engineering obstacles to producing gravity wells, much less anti-gravity "hills" using projected energy of some kind that are probably almost as bad as simply trying to garner the energy to push mass to
c the "conventional" way.
