Speed of light: Why you care

This was going to be a comment response until it got too long, so: here's your implications:

Our current understanding of the way the universe works is largely based on well tested and well understood theories started by Einstein and built upon by pretty much every physicist since. These laws say things CAN'T move faster than the speed of light. Since space and time are intertwined, if you are moving as fast as you can in space, you can't move *any* in time. You can read more about that, but it's been one of the rock-solid foundations of physics for a long, long time.

The critical thing about this is that we may have just proven that theory wrong. If something, ANYTHING, can ever travel faster than light under *any* circumstances, the entire theory *instantaneously* falls apart. (I know, isn't science CRAZY?) Now this isn't instantaneously catastrophic for most of the physics we know and love. After all, the fact that Newtonian Physics falls apart at the very small and very large doesn't mean that we can't use it to approximate a lot of useful things.

But notably, all science is about trying to correctly model the way the universe actually works. In that way, being proven wrong is actually sometimes more interesting than just being right over and over. It would be as if we had to update the theory of gravity to include "except for at 3:57 on Thursday afternoon in Topeka, Canada for about 1/10th of a second". All of a sudden there are a billion more questions to answer. "Why?" "Why not Wednesday?" As to this faster-than-light thing, similar questions arise. "Why these particles?" "Can we see the same phenomena from other sources?" "If things can travel faster than light, how come light doesn't?" The answers to these questions will inform whatever theory rises up to replace the broken one, and will offer a more complete and correct understanding of the universe. And with that better understanding, who knows what new technology could eventually be informed by our better knowledge. We got MRIs from a whole bunch of physicists who had no interest in medical imaging *at all*. Maybe in the future we will look back at this as the first breakthrough that eventually led to faster than light travel for the human race!

Or, you know, maybe the thing is just off a little.

-N