What's the fundamental reason why the speed of light cannot be

broken?

Marcus Geduld, Widely-read science buff.

25k Views Upvoted by Hadayat Seddiqi, engineering @ biotech startup
Marcus has 140+ answers in Science.
I am not a physicist, so please forgive me if I'm wrong, here. And, physicists (or people
who understand Physics better than me), please correct my mistakes. Thanks. I am
mostly answering this to see if I can. I learn best by trying to answer questions.
The heavier something is, the harder it is to move. That's common sense, and we
experience it every day. We expect to have a much easier time pushing a toy car than a
real car or a marble than a cannon ball. The more something weighs, the more energy we
need to push it.
(For accuracies sake, I should quit talking about weight and "heaviness" and talk,
instead, about mass. The more mass something has, the more energy is required to move
it. But since weightwhich really only exists when mass meets gravityis intuitive, I'll
continue to evoke it. Think of it as a metaphor.)
So let's say we launch a really big space shipsay the size of the Starship Enterprise. We
would expect it to require a lot of energy as propulsion. Worse, the faster things go, the
more they weigh (the more mass they have), so if we keep trying to make the Enterprise
move faster and faster, we'll need more and more energy to push it. Atsome speed, we'll
need so much energy to push it, we'll use up all the energy in the Universe. Let's call that
speed S.
Just as a recap, S is the speed the Enterprise can travel if we use all the energy in the
Universe to push it.
What if we want it to move faster than S? Well, we're out of energy, so we have to make
the ship lighter (we have to make it have less mass). If we jettison, say, all the crew
members, the ship won't weigh as much. Which means we'll get more speed out of all the
energy in the Universe. We'll be able to move the ship at speed S[1], which is some speed
that's faster than S.
If we jettison all the chairs and tables, we'll be able to move the ship at S[2]. If we
jettison all the shuttlecrafts, we'll be able to move at S[4]. Etc.
Let's keep breaking off parts of the Enterprise to get it to move faster and faster. Let's
break off so much of it, that it only has one unit of weight (really mass) left. I'm not sure
what the ship is now, but imagine it's a tiny little spec that is as light as an object can be.
It moves at, let's say, S[5,000].

How could we make it move even faster than S[5,000]? By making it weigh nothing at
all! If the more something weighs, the more energy you need to push it, the way to get
the biggest bang for your buck is to make the object you're pushing weigh nothing at all.
Imagine how fast you could throw a baseball if it was totally weightless!
Alas, we can't make the Enterprise weigh nothing at all, but there is something that does
weigh nothing: a photon. (Again, strictly speaking, a photon has no mass.) A photon is a
particle of light. Since light particles weigh nothing, they can travel the fastest it's
possible for anything to travel, which is, in the system I made up, maybe S[5,001].
As it happens, we know the real value of S[5,001]. It's around 180-thousand miles-per-
second. That's how fast something can travel if it weighs nothing. And, if you think about
what I wrote above, if it weighs nothing, it requires no energy to push it. As soon as you
add a little weight to something, it requires energy to push, and the faster you push it,
the more energy it requires. To push an object with weight (mass) at 180-thousand
miles-per-second, you'd need more energy than exists in the Universe. So you're shit out
of luck, Captain Kirk!

The lingering question here is why 180-thousand miles per second? What's magic about
that? Why can't a photon travel faster than that? (Why can't light travel faster than the
speed of light?)

As far as I know (again, Physicists, please correct me if I'm wrong), the answer to that
is because. Because that's just the way our Universe is built. It's a physical law we
acquired by being a product of the Big Bang. If there are other universes, perhaps the
constant is faster (or slower) in some of them.
When we get to a certain base level of "why?" questions, the answer is always going to be
"because." Our universe seems to be a game with certain rules (the Laws of Physics).
Why those rules and not other rules?

Because...
UPDATE: I asked Joshua Engel (who has a degree in physics) to look this over and
critique it. Here's what he sent me in an email, posted with his permission:
It's pretty good. It's not really "fundamental", but then, most askers aren't really
prepared for "fundamental" answers. All we can do is throw out a series of
approximations and hope that one of them fits the actual level they're at.
We can say a little more than just "because" when it comes to why the speed of light is
what it is, though it rapidly gets out of an area I'm comfortable talking about. Within
special relativity, you can say it's because space "just is" the Minkowski metric
(s^2=x^2+y^2+z^2-(ct)^2), and it's the fact that s is independent of all observers that
lets you solve for c and get the answer we get. (In particular, s=0 for light).

If one understands general relativity, one can take it down a few steps further, to
fundamental shape-of-the-universe constants like the Ricci tensor and the Ricci scalar,
and generalize that to branes and such gibberish like that, but that's far beyond my pay
grade.
So no matter where you go, there's always an "it just is", but for practically all people the
"it just is" has more to do with the amount of study they've put in rather than what is
known or can be known.
Instead, we throw a variety of arguments, all based on the same thing as users, and see
what "sticks".

The one quibble: photons do have mass, in the sense that they have energy and E=m
(with an extra c^2 constant in there to make the units work out). They don't have any
energy if they were stopped, because they have no rest mass. They get their energy from
the extra E=pc component that most people leave out of the equation: they have no mass
but they do have momentum. If you get whacked by a photon, you get pushed; that's how
solar sails work.
That's exactly where your argument goes: when you take the limit of mass to zero, you
get a photon, which has no mass at rest and therefore can never be at rest, or in fact at
any speed other than c, which is the only one where the various infinities cancel out to
yield a non-infinite value.