COULD WE TRAVEL FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT?
The speed of light is roughly 300,000,000 metres per second, which is fast enough to travel around our planet seven-and-a-half times a second – that’s fast! In fact, it’s the fastest thing we know of, but why is it so difficult to travel at this speed? Surely if we were far away from any other forces, like gravity, we could just keep accelerating and eventually we would get there, wouldn’t we?
Unfortunately, no. One of the things that Einstein realised from his theories of relativity is that as any particle of mass increases in speed, it also increases in mass. By the time the mass has finally reached the speed of light, it would have infinite mass, which would mean to get it to that stage would have required an infinite amount of energy.