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

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Actually I guess thats the answer to the OP's question.

The Higgs Boson is the traffic cop, not light itself, that stops you from reaching light speed.

Though the Higgs wasnt even thought of until a century after Einstein proposed relativity (which depends upon the SOL being constant and unbreakable), and wasnt proven to exist until last year at Cern.

Not to mention that the aether was the generic name given to "that which everything with existence exists in" to paraphrase a paper from over a hundred years ago. It became shorthand for space before such a thing was known to exist; it simply *had* to exist to make all the theories make sense.

Yes, that is what special relativity predicts: 'To the photon time does not exist until it strikes the upper atmosphere of our planet and even then is only slowed down by a tiny fraction'

source: http://www.emc2-explained.info/Time-Dil ... kaViXbhCUk (skip to the bottom)

From a photon's reference frame, there is no time.
If you were a photon, it would 'feel' as though any and all distances were traversed instantly.

I am not an expert and am open to correction if I am incorrect.

What is it expanding into?

Someone else on another thread on WP corrected us for thinking that the Universe couldnt be bigger than 14 billion light years in radius ( because the universe is 14 billion years old and stuff cant move faster away from the big bang than the SOL), and this person said "space can expand faster than the speed of light". But since I passed that gem on to folks in this thread I have been wondering that too! Lol!

Damn! Wished I had asked that guy that question.


But actually- my theory is that empty space is a thing in itself. Beyond the edge of the expanding Universe there is no matter, no energy, AND there is no empty space either. Since we are composed of matter, and energy, and empty space, we cant imagine an absence of all three things.

The best estimate of the age of the universe as of 2015 is 13.799±0.021 billion years[5] but due to the expansion of space humans are observing objects that were originally much closer but are now considerably farther away (as defined in terms of cosmological proper distance, which is equal to the comoving distance at the present time) than a static 13.8 billion light-years distance.[8] It is estimated that the diameter of the observable universe is about 28.5 gigaparsecs (93 billion light-years, 8.8×1026 metres or 5.5×1023 miles),[9] putting the edge of the observable universe at about 46.5 billion light-years away.[10][11]
Source:Wikipedia

So yeah the Universe is at least 93 Billion light years across.
The age of the Universe is around 13.799 Billion years.
Rate of expansion exceeds C allowing for the size of the Universe to exceed 13.799 Billion light years.

Kewl hey?

The only frame of reference is from WITHIN the expanding Universe, ergo we must not think of it as an object expanding 'into' anything. There is no 'into'. We do not have any access to anything outside of the Universe and thus believe that there is NO outside at all. We may never know, as there is no known data from any so called 'outside'.

Of course the Multiverse Theories take a different view.

As an additional/alternative way of explaining...to paraphrase an old physics prof of mine:
Our perceptions and conceptions are a product of our universe. Let's say there was "something" that the edge of our universe was pushing up against, or moving into that we could perceive. In order for us to perceive it - in order for it to "be" for us - it would have to follow the laws of our universe. Therefore, it would be our universe, too.

Well said.

As a kid I used to think that the universe has a square-shaped woodden border.

Anyone know, is it possible that there are suns close to where space expands? Because if that's the case, you can actually see there! But if not...

When I was young I tried to figure out what actually *would* happen to something with mass and inertia if it reached the edge of our universe. On one side of the edge there is energy, mass, space and time. On the other side, none of the above. Best I could come up with were two possibilities: either the object & the energy it carried would simply cease to exist as it exited, or somehow, it's total E=mc2 would be retained in the universe.

You mean near the edge, but still "inside"?
That is possible, but since it is outside our reference (more lightyears away than the age of the universe), we will never be able to see them, unless we learn to travel faster-than-light (trough warp speed, supspace, wormholes, whathaveyou)

The speed of light should really be called the speed of space, imo .

I have pondered this situation for a while now. My theory is that the object would undergo a gradual decrease in dimensonality (3D -> 2D -> 1D) as it came in contact with the edge of the universe.

The "edge of the universe" is nothing more than where matter is flying away from us faster than the speed of light.

The further apart two points in the universe are where they are not gravitationally bound, the faster they are moving apart. Two points that are twice as far apart would move apart twice as fast because there is twice as much space between them. If the two points are far enough apart, there will be so much expanding space between the two points that they will be moving apart at the speed of light. Go further and they will be moving apart at faster than the speed of light.

This is demonstrated by the red shift. The further a galaxy is from us, the greater the red shift.

In other words, the edge of the universe is nothing more than the distance from us beyond which we can never detect signals from because of the speed of light.

There is no boundary where the universe ends.