Relativistic Beaming. Time Travel. Through The Wormhole: Can We Travel Faster Than Light? Prior to the day in 1947 when test pilot Charles E. Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier for the first time, people argued it wasn't possible for a plane to fly that fast. So, perhaps we shouldn't be deterred by the part of Einstein's special theory of relativity that seemingly bars traveling at speeds faster than light. That said, cracking the light-speed barrier is vastly more complicated than going faster than sound. The aircraft that Yeager used to break Mach 1, for example, didn't have to change form. But according to Einstein, an object that attains light speed would be converted to energy itself.
Nevertheless, as some physicists point out, there are nuances of Einsteinian physics that might permit faster-than-light travel. Watch the full documentary now. Faster than the Speed of Light? Speed of light. The Speed of Light | Light-Speed Constant C. The speed of light in a vacuum is 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second), and in theory nothing can travel faster than light. In miles per hour, light speed is, well, a lot: about 670,616,629 mph. If you could travel at the speed of light, you could go around the Earth 7.5 times in one second. Early scientists, unable to perceive light’s motion, thought it must travel instantaneously. Over time, however, measurements of the motion of these wave-like particles became more and more precise. Thanks to the work of Albert Einstein and others, we now understand light speed to be a theoretical limit: light speed — a constant called "c" — is thought to be not acheivable by anything with mass, for reasons explained below.
Speed of light: History of the theory The first known discourse on the speed of light comes from the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who penned his disagreement with another Greek scientist, Empedocles. Einstein and special relativity What is a light-year? Speed Of Light.