Can anything go faster than the speed of light?
Well, we always thought the answer to that was a definite NO. However, scientists reported in 2000 that they had exceeded the cosmic speed limit. In a landmark experiment, they caused a light pulse to travel at many times the speed of light, so fast that the peak of the pulse exited a specially prepared test chamber before it even finished entering it. According to the scientists, the results are “not at odds with Einstein,” though on the surface they appear to contradict his theory of relativity, which holds that the speed of light in a vacuum (about 186,000 miles per second) is the fastest anything can go. Said Lijun Wang, one of the scientists at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, NJ, who conducted the experiment: “Our experiment does show that the generally held misconception that ‘nothing can move faster than the speed of light’ is wrong.” Nothing with mass can exceed the light-speed limit. But physicists now believe that a pulse of light, which is a group of massless indivi
