At some point in our lives, we’ve all wondered if its possible to travel faster than the speed of light, just like how the Flash can move at ‘lightning’ speeds without working up a sweat. While modern physics deems this idea entirely impossible, there are some theories that suggest that some things in our universe may actually exceed the universal upper-speed limit.
In theory, it’s easy to ignore different factors such as air resistance or the effects of quantum mechanics on an object, but when talking about a real-life object, we have to take everything into account. For example, if two objects move from one place to another at the speed of light, the distance between them would increase faster as they are in motion. This all depends on what we consider to be the measure of speed of light and what medium the objects propagate in, not to mention the physics of space-time which is an entirely different and complicated topic to discuss right now. The speed of the objects also depends on what we consider to be the point of reference.
As explained in the video by Fermilab, the speed of light is different in different mediums. For example, if light enters a transparent medium like glass or water, it slows down while a charged particle would move with the same speed, hence appearing to move faster than light in that specific medium. So technically, we can say that some objects do travel faster than light under certain conditions.
While it’s still not possible to move a man-made object at the speed of light, many assumptions have been made regarding recent fundamental theories that shed new light on this topic, instead of rejecting the possibility of objects ever being able to travel faster than light, while not rejecting the laws of physics.