I seem to remember that there was much talk about how the Sound Barrier was an absolute that could not be broken and the aircraft that tried would go out of control and disintegrate. Then, Chuck Yeager flew to Mach 1.07 on 14 October 1947 and the myth was debunked.
Who says we cannot go faster than light? The Light Barrier is an absolute? It is just another obstacle to be broken and a challenge to conventional thinking. We’ve got to think outside the box; say “yes it can be broken” and then figure out how to do it.
The point of the mathematics of Relativity is NOT that the speed of light absolutely can NOT be broken, but that we can not break that barrier by adding more and more energy to the object, as with a jet plane. This is due to the observed FACT that as we add energy, the object gets increasingly heavy.
Particles in the most advanced accelerators have so much energy that “at top speed” they weigh in excess of 10,000 times their stationary mass, and are traveling on the order of 0.9999995 times the speed of light. Adding ten times the amount of energy will make them 100,000 times more massive, and their speed will become on the order of 0.999999995 times the speed of light. Rapidly diminishing returns.