Why can't we go faster than the speed of light?

Answer 1

Because the Kilngons hold the patents on that type of equipment. (I thought everyone knew that!)

Answer 2

As you get going faster and faster in your starship, you are putting more and more energy into the ship by speeding it up, so the ship keeps getting heavier. (Again, I should really be saying "massier" not "heavier" since there is no gravity in space.) By the time you reach 90 percent of the speed of light, the ship has so much energy in it that it actually has about twice the mass as the ship has at rest. It gets harder and harder to propel with the engines, because it's so heavy. As you get closer to the speed of light, you begin to get diminishing returns — the more energy the ship has, the heavier it gets, so the more energy that must be put into it to speed it up just a little bit, the heavier it gets, and so on.

The effect is even worse than you might think because of what is going on inside the ship. After all, everything inside the ship, including you, is speeding up, getting more and more energy, and getting heavier and heavier. In fact, you and all the machines on the ship are getting pretty sluggish. Your watch, for instance, which used to weigh about half an ounce, now weighs about forty tons. And the spring inside your watch really hasn't gotten any stronger, so the watch has slowed way down so that it only ticks once an hour. Not only has your watch slowed down, but the biological clock inside your head has also slowed down. You don't notice this because your neurons are getting heavier, and your thoughts are slowed down by exactly the same amount as the watch. As far as you are concerned, your watch is just ticking along at the same rate as before. (Physicists call this "relativistic time contraction.") The other thing that is slowed down is all of the machinery that is powering your engines (the dilithium crystals are getting heavier and slower, too). So your ship is getting heavier, your engines are getting sluggish, and the closer you get to the speed of light, the worse it gets. It just gets harder and harder and harder, and no matter how hard you try, you just can't quite get over the light barrier. And that's why you can't go faster than the speed of light.

Answer 3

The faster an object moves the more energy is required to get it moving faster. The speed of light is very fast indeed, 186212 miles per second, so much energy would be required to get anything up to such a speed that the energy would become part of the mass of the object, this would require even more energy, there is not enough energy in the universe to get an object up to the speed of light.

Answer 4

IF we ever even reach light speed, that's the day of revelation. To go beyond that is godly.

Einstein theory of relativity address that question quite well. Mass will increase exponentially so that the velocity will reduce, until mass becomes an infinite value when the velocity reach light speed.

Just pondering, photons, even if does not have rest mass, but this mass can be calculated by quantum theory and the dual nature of light using Planck's equation.
Why is it that these photons do not become massive at all ?

Answer 5

It would require an infinent amount of energy
relitivity states m= original mass/(1-(v^2)/c^2)
so as v aproches c, mass would approch infinity
Since F=ma, acceleration would gradually decreace
F/infinity = 0 so you can't really reach let alone pass the speed of light can you.

Note: there are tons of other ways to show this, and some ways to go past the speed of light from other view points, but basically it is impossible

Answer 6

"mathwhiz1" has given you the best answer that explains the reason. The others are either just wrong, or don't give you enough information.

To accelerate any object to near light speed takes a lot of energy. The closer to the speed of light, the amount of energy required approaches infinity.

Answer 7

That energy thing others talked about. Also, remember that as you approach the speed of light, distances you need to travel actually shrink from your perspective, so that at the speed of light you seem to be able to travel to any star or even distant galaxy instantly. Hard to do better than that, from the traveler's perspective. Of course, the rest of the universe sees a lot of time passing during your instant trip.

Answer 8

Who says we can't? Well we'd better build a ship that can or we'll never be able to populate other planets and the human race won't survive. The nearest known inhabitable planet is 120 light years from here, much too far to reach even at the speed of light. And even if the physicists tell you it can't be done, be skeptical. Einstein famously told people that it was impossible to split the atom and that you would always need to put more energy in than you would get out of it. Well now look where we are in the nuclear age! Nothing is impossible, only thinking makes it so.

Answer 9

Because, it would require all the energy in the world to accelerate us to the speed of light.
This is because as an object approaches the speed of light, it gains mass, and therefore, requires more energy to accelerate said object. As it gets ever closer to the speed of light the rate of mass gain increases exponentially, and the energy needed to change the force of the object's inertia becomes greater and greater, until it becomes infinite as the speed of light is almost reached, and inorder to reach the speed of light, all the mass in the universe must of had been converted into pure energy and that includes the object itself.

Answer 10

Unlike Newtonian mechanics, in special relativity, there is a distinction between inertial mass, which depends on speed, and rest mass, which it an objects resistance to acceleration from rest. Inertial mass approaches infinity as a object with finite rest mass approaches the speed of light, so it would require infinite energy to attain it.

Answer 11

Time slows down as you approach the speed of light and stops when you reach that ultimate speed.

Since speed is measured as the distance traveled during a certain time, if time is not passing there is nothing to measure.

By the way, this has been tested with ultra-sensitive time instruments being sent through space as very fast speeds and time does indeed slow down.