Suggestion:
It is the speed of light.
If you were on a train going just barely under the speed of light, you could walk and run normally but you still wouldn't be going faster than light.
To understand this, you must consider two frames of reference: The outside observer, and yourself.
To an outside observer the train would be going almost the speed of light, and they would see you running towards to front of the train just barely outpacing the speed of the train – they wouldn't see you going faster than light, they would see you moving like you were in molasses, moving very very slowly towards the front of the train as the train carries you by at nearly the speed of light.
To you, you're just running towards the front of the train and you feel like you are moving freely. In fact, if you turn on a flashlight, it will zip away from you at the speed of light. (The outside observer would see the light beam slowly outpace you as it would be going 186000 miles per second and you'd be going just under that.)
How is that possible?
It's because as you approach the speed of light time actually dilates for you. What seems like just a second to you might seem like an hour to that outside observer who is stationary. It seems to you that you got to the front of the train in a minute, but to the outside observer a year may have passed. (The amount of dilation, and thus the amount of discrepancy depends on just how close to the speed of light the train is going.)
With the dilation of time also comes dilation of mass. The faster you go, the more massive you become. You don't notice it driving on the freeway because you're nowhere near the speed of light. But as you approach the speed of light, you approach infinite mass. The faster you are going, the more massive you are, and the more energy it takes to get you moving faster. If you actually got to the speed of light you'd be infinitely massive and it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate you to that speed. That means it's physically impossible. (Even if you found a way – which you wouldn't – you'd destroy the entire universe.)
The only way to get to the speed of light would be to remove ALL your mass so that there's nothing to increase your mass. Perhaps this could be done by removing all your Higgs-Boson particles? Anyway, if you were to do that and somehow retain your cognitive ability (you can't), then you'd instantly exist exactly AT the speed of light, unable to speed up or slow down except as a function of whatever medium you were flowing through. Time would be so dilated for you that it would cease to exist. You'd zip from one end of the universe to the other instantaneously even though, to the outside observer, it would take billions of years. You would be pure photonic energy and the entire history of the universe would happen at once for you.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Speed of light is 186,282 miles per second, which is pretty fast.
To give you an idea how vast space is, it takes light over 8 minutes to get from the Sun to the Earth
As things go faster, time slows down. Light doesn't age.
It is, as far as we know, impossible for anything to travel faster than light.
do you mean what is that phenomena called?
well it's called special relativity postulated by einstein.
the speed of light is 3*10^8 m/sec and that's the fastest speed ever known, though some say that black holes are faster than speed of light because they swallow photons and photons are light and as noticed they are called <<black>> holes which means even light can't escape it.
speed of light is:
186,000 miles per second
300,000,000 meters per second
300,000 km per second
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