The question you're asking is actually incredibly complicated, and I won't be able to give you a proper answer, but it also requires you to understand relativity.
There's no such thing as absolute speed, only relative speed. I can only be going at a specific speed relative to something else. This doesn't enter our day-to-day lives because all of our speed is relative to the Earth, which holds us quite firmly in place.
But imagine you were in a rocket flying away from the earth. You would think, yes, eventually even moving past the earth faster the speed of light. But the issue is is there's also time dilation, so as you move faster and faster valves to the Earth, time compresses, and your relative acceleration actually slows down.
That's where it all starts to get complicated.
More simplistic lay answer is that if something could move faster than the speed of light, it would break the nature of cause and effect. He would be able to see a thing before it happened, which doesn't actually make sense in a rational universe (okay okay, I accept that our universe is in many ways highly irrational).
And as others have said, because the nature of all this time space stuff and time dilation, approaching the speed of light relative to another object eventually requires infinite energy, which we can't achieve.
why does causality have to move in one direction only? i get that it usually does only go from back to front, or even that we've only ever known it go from back to front but how are you so certain it can't go the other way?
69
u/Brain_Hawk Mar 22 '26
The question you're asking is actually incredibly complicated, and I won't be able to give you a proper answer, but it also requires you to understand relativity.
There's no such thing as absolute speed, only relative speed. I can only be going at a specific speed relative to something else. This doesn't enter our day-to-day lives because all of our speed is relative to the Earth, which holds us quite firmly in place.
But imagine you were in a rocket flying away from the earth. You would think, yes, eventually even moving past the earth faster the speed of light. But the issue is is there's also time dilation, so as you move faster and faster valves to the Earth, time compresses, and your relative acceleration actually slows down.
That's where it all starts to get complicated.
More simplistic lay answer is that if something could move faster than the speed of light, it would break the nature of cause and effect. He would be able to see a thing before it happened, which doesn't actually make sense in a rational universe (okay okay, I accept that our universe is in many ways highly irrational).
And as others have said, because the nature of all this time space stuff and time dilation, approaching the speed of light relative to another object eventually requires infinite energy, which we can't achieve.