Can Anything Travel Faster Than Light

Einstein hypothesized, in 1906, that it was impossible for anything to move faster than the speed of light. In the last year, however, this postulation has been put to the test. Last year, Antonio Ereditato, coordinator of the OPERA experiment at The Nation Institute Of Nuclear Physics (INFN), challenged this theorization.

Einstein hypothesized that the speed of light (in a vacuum) was approximately 186,280 miles per second or 700 million miles per hour. He theorized that this was the max speed anything could reach and implemented it in his theory of relativity.

Physicists running routine neutrino experiments between CERN’s Geneva HQ in Switzerland and the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy 455 miles away have found that their neutrinos seem to be traveling faster than the speed of light. That’s right: faster than the fastest known speed in the universe.

If these findings are factual this would be a historical discovery of immense proportions. The CERN physicists were firing neutrinos (which do not interact with normal matter and can pass directly through the earth) at the INFN.

Time, however, is a function of relative motion. The faster you move relative to another object, the slower your time moves relative to the time at that object. As you approach the speed of light, this effect intensifies, making it harder and harder to go faster and faster. Remember: to move you must push on something. Your car pushes off the road to move forward (or to move the road back), a rocket thrusts exhaust back to move forward. The energy needed to accelerate increases as your speed approaches the speed of light. And, as my dad used to say, "There's always one more [factor] than you counted on." As you approach the speed of light, your mass increases. The more mass you are trying to move, the more energy you need to move it. At the speed of light, your mass theoretically becomes infinite, requiring infinite energy to move it any faster.

Unfortunately for the physicists, their results were wrong. They were due to an inaccurate distance between the two labs. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light. In physics-as-we-understand-them, it is the absolute and ultimate speed limit in our universe. We’ve tested and retested the speed of light, measured it in as many ways as we can think of, and much of modern physics is built upon the idea that nothing can exceed it.