You often hear that "light speed cannot be exceeded" or nothing can go faster than the speed of light. That concept isn't true in a number of situations. The easiest two examples are the expansion of space/time and falling into a black hole.

The universe has expanded at different rates at different times and has recently "sped up". The speed of light is constant only relative to the space/time containing it's existence; or in other words, "where it is at!".

The expansion rate of space/time after the big bang was enormous! During that period light, and everything else, was hauling azz away from each other at speeds that make light look like a slow poke!

Consider the effect gravity has on the light near a black hole. The gravity does "suck" the light in or it would slow the light trying to escape. The speed of light in this case does not change. Instead, space/time is being stretched as it enters the black hole making the space/time longer and longer making the light travel farther and farther trying to get out! Another way to describe it would be that the light trying to get out is traveling at the speed of light but the space/time surrounding the light is falling in at a speed greater than the speed of light. Therefore, the light has an outward vector equal to the speed of light and an inward vector just greater at the event horizon and increasingly greater at it approaches the singularity.

Time, therefore, runs normal far away from the black hole and increasingly slower as the distance to the black hole is reduced. Falling in and getting close to the singularity, time all but stops.

not really, since time is just a perception... nothing can go back in time, because time does not exist but in our minds...

Yes, thought is able to move far faster than the speed of light

lol, no, if anything it is just a bit slower... the only time light moves at the speed of light is in a vacuum, like space... i'm not sure how fast electricity goes, but since there is no vacuum in our heads, it has to be slower...

I think that would depend on the distance traveled.
For example
The speed of thought - for my car to from 0-300mph would be slower than the speed of light. Because my mind cannot think as fast as the light traveling that short of a distance.
On the other hand, if my car was to travel from here to the sun. Then thought would be faster than the speed of light.
Does that make since?

I disagree completely! In my experience many heads are filled with vacuum.

Electricity (the wave) travels at the speed of light as it is just another frequency of electromagnetic radiation. However, the electrons who "generate" the electricity move far far slower because they have mass.

MetalWing is right on all counts. When you plug something in to a working DC socket, you will 'instantly' have an electric field acting throughout the whole circuit. I believe the wave front of that field moves at a speed comparable to light.

As far as the speed of our thoughts - the idea presented above seems to be that nerve activity is electrical in nature and therefore might travel at the speeds comparable to circuits....

Nerve signal propagation relies on the opening of gates in the membranes of our cells, allowing ions to flow through the membrane. There is an electrical component but there is also a mechanical component, too. You could look it up online, but nerve signals - while fast! - are not as fast as the movement of an electric field in a wire.

I remember reading some years ago that the speed of brain electrical transmissions was about 700 mph on average.

Quite a few things move faster than the speed of light, but one in particular is thought, it is very much faster. Anywhere on this planet it takes seconds, on say the moon, it would be something like 2-3 minutes.

Actually no, if intent is behind it it is definitely faster than the speed light. I am talking about the mind, not the brain, that is far slower, I have had incidences when I was able to prove this, by independent people

The energy the brain uses is the same energy the sun has.

Light impulse from the sun comes from the explosion of it's gases.

Our body functions are controlled by the mini rapid explosions.

Another thought.
Light must be composed of a teeny bit of mass.
Wind can refract it, causing an immeasurable but real reduction in velocity.

i think it could be called explosions...

the energy from the sun is a lot of kinetic energy from the protons bouncing off each other from how dense the sun is...

scientists speculate a single proton leaving the core may take thousands of years to get to space just because of the collisions it goes through to get to the outer layer...

Perhaps Light is best thought of as a transmission, of a field, which is given an attribute of quanta by thinking minds for comparative measurement. This way you can include it in a math theory that describes the physical universe accurately.

Doesn't make it little quanta. It's still just a transmission, of a field.

I personally have a hard time believing that nothing can move faster than light. There was a time when people thought it would be impossible to move faster than sound. But that has been done.

I am far from being an expert on this and I'm just giving my opinion. The problem I see with trying to go faster than light isn't the energy required. But being able to build something that can take the stresses that kind of speed would put on a vessel. I kind of expect if someone found a way to go faster than light than they would need a vessel that was pretty much seamless so that things didn't rip apart. Regardless of if it's possible to achieve that speed. I would worry more about the ship to do it in.

You never defined what you meant by light, nor what Einstein did.

packets of photons...though i prefer packets of muffins
or gravity

so they say

Here are two different questions:

1) Is it possible for an object to move through space faster than speed X.

2) Can we build a structure that will get us from A to B, faster than the speed of X.

Looking at it this way, the situation with light is actually the REVERSE of the situation with sound.

With sound, we knew that 'things' can go faster than the speed of sound. We (some of us) just didn't think we could engineer a craft that could do so within our atmosphere, without the being destroyed by the stresses, or simply being uncontrollable in direction.

We knew that it wouldn't violate the laws of physics, but some people question are ability to engineer it. So we know that the answer to (1) was 'yes', and some people thought the answer to (2) was 'no'.

Today, we have the reverse situation. We know that it is physically impossible to move matter through space at faster than the speed of light.

However, we have been playing with far off ideas for how we might succeed in relocating things with the effective result being faster than moving the object through space at near light speeds.

We've all heard of worm holes, but there have been other ideas that people have played with (which i've forgotten, and didn't fully understand).

Of course, our technology is not there, but many people believe that our technology will eventually get there.

So today, our answer to (1) is 'no', but many of us believe we can eventually answer (2) with a 'yes', regardless.

Its actually the opposite of what some people said about going faster than the speed of sound.

Our knowledge of physics suggests that - if we are talking about simply applying a force and accelerating and object - than the energy will be a problem.

Actually, it would be impossible.

The closer to c, the heavier you get, the more energy needed to make an incremental improvement to your speed.

I won't argue that it's certainly not possible with today's technology. But being as people keep learning new things and advancing. Who knows what will be possible in the future. Maybe the answer is making a space craft out of foam. lol

The inside track is light doesn't move nor go anywhere. It's an energization, but any changing state has a rate of change...



Rather than double post I'll edit to express another point I thought prudent,
muons have mass and can go very fast, measured at almost the speed of light, as fast as any transmission of rest mass and information as ever recorded and even theorized.

Muons go so fast they time travel. Yes, once in motion everything is time travelling due to SR (length contraction). The muon/traveller experiences normal time, but the relative observer is in another velocity vector, ergo experiences time differently.

The physical observation was that a muon dramatically exceeded its atomic lifespan when travelling close to the speed of light, perfectly in accordance with Einstein's prediction.

It proved you can travel further than the distance physically possible at the speed you're doing, the traveller will believe he somehow got there faster than the speedometer reads, but the observer will believe the traveller aged more slowly than he should've.

To the traveller this is time travel exactly the way you see warp drive and hyperspace motivators in science fiction.
It's to the observer in your relative point of origin which sees no such thing, but after centuries of travel dead bodies do not arrive, the crew is perfectly healthy and might've aged only years.

That's normal special relativity, which is proven and we currently base all hard science on it, including computer engineering. It wouldn't work if it wasn't correct, so it's correct. We observe examples of it being correct and any other hypothesis being falsified.

We can fly around the stars like you see in the movies. That's just a question of engines/fuel/energy-technology. It isn't a problem for the crew. It's the people back home that you'll never see again, but the planet and many generations later of population will probably still be around for a return home. You can meet your descendants.

Nothing but straight classical physics laws in all that.