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A comment on Why nothing can go faster than the speed of light. Parent comment

Re:Why nothing can go faster than the speed of light by oewolf on Monday February 21, 2011 @06:21AM (#2245058)
This clarified a few questions I had.

Hope you can help me with a couple: why is there even a limit? how do we know there is an insuperable barrier nothing can cross for sure?

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Re:Why nothing can go faster than the speed of light by perlgeek on Monday February 21, 2011 @07:07AM (#2245132)
A physicist can never certainly say that something doesn't happen.

We have models that describe the world very well, but those models are never the whole truth (and even it were, we couldn't be sure of it).

Special and General Relativity are experimentally very well tested, and these theories predict that a particle that has a speed < c can never acquire a speed > c. There are solutions for speeds larger than c, but those solutions are quite weird, and can't interact with "normal" particles.

But the mere scientific approach of observing facts, modeling and verifying means that one can never be sure that something can't be - only in the limits of the models can we be sure that a thing can't be.

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