Einstein called it the “The Universe’s speed limit. According to him nothing could travel faster than the speed of light as it would violate causality principles which in physics are the principle of cause and effect. It would be the same as a bullet hitting a target before the trigger was pulled.
This is why we can’t travel faster than light because if that was possible it would violate all fundamental energy conditions and could then make time travel possible.
The speed of light is the speed of a photon in a vacuum which is 186,282 miles per second. We see photons traveling at this speed because they are weightless having no mass but filled with kinetic energy. Every photon in the universe travels through the Higss field. This is the field that gives particles their mass. The varied interaction of particles within this field in different strengths is the factor that makes some particles heavier than others. Photons, on the other hand, move through the Higgs field but no interaction takes place,
Since Photons don’t interact with the Higgs field, they are nit bund by a speed limit and can move at the fastest speeds possible which is light sped. This is also the amazing reason why the speed of light is constant. Light cannot go faster or slower than 186,282 miles per second. That is a fundamental constant of the universe.
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The reason why light doesn’t travel at a different speed is because such constants were fixed in place at the time of the big bang when our universe was being created. Wandering about such a thing is the same as wondering why gravity isn’t reversed. Just as gravity pulls you to the center of earth and cannot be contemplated in a different perspective. So is the speed of light.
According to the laws of physics, the faster a particle travels, the heavier it gets. The closer you get to traveling at the speed of light, the more energy required as your weight will increase. It would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a single electron to light speed because it would become extremely heavy and there isn’t enough energy in this entire universe to do that.
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Einstein had a neat perspective. He said you u should imagine yourself as a photon created by a star far far away or to be precise 4 billion years away. It would take you 4 billion years to travel from the star to a human’s retina but from your perspective, in the very instant that you were created, you suddenly see yourself bouncing ff someone’s retina. That’s because time has no meaning for a photon. Birth and death all happens in an instant.
As soon as you accelerate towards light speed, time slows down. And, at the speed of light time stops. Thus theoretically for the universe you are traveling 4 billion light years but for you as a photon, that seems like a second. This is why we can’t travel faster than light. It would be like halting a car and going slower than the condition of the still car. You can’t stop time any less than it has already stopped when traveling at light speed. Light speed is infinite speed. As a photon you could travel at the speed of light to a distance in zero seconds but to an observer that is translated as billions of years. Watch the video for a simpler explanation.