[sola_fide]

I haven't read all of the 300+ posts on this thread, so someone may have already said this. BUT, the theory of General Relativity most emphatically does not imply that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. However, it does imply that nothing my break through that "light barrier" if you will. In other words anything travelling slower than the speed of light can never go faster than c; nothing travelling faster than c can ever go slower than c.

[CutePuppy]

That would imply at least two corollaries?

1. Anything that travels faster than the speed of light also has a constant speed.

2. Anything that we know now travels at the speed slower than the speed of light will never exceed the speed of light.

The photon differs from many other elementary particles, such as the electron and the quark, in that it has zero rest mass;[3] therefore, it travels (in vacuum) at the speed of light, c.

My guess is that researchers had imperfect measurement instruments and, with the distance of only 3 feet, extrapolated results were susceptible to large variance. Which makes me thinks that we are more likely to witness cold fusion before we witness something going faster than speed of light. Come to think of it, maybe the process of cold fusion will create something faster than the speed of light, and they are interdependent? Hmmm...

[3niner]

Good point. When people talk about going faster than the speed of light, they generally mean taking something travelling slower than the speed of light, making it travel faster than the speed of light, for a time, then getting it back to less than the speed of light at a desired destination.

Shorthand for this generally incudes terms such as “breaking the light barrier”, etc.