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Comment by sidcool | Hacker News Reader

There is a very interesting concept that indicates that the limit of speed is not light, but the space itself. Space itself is such that it cannot let anything travel faster than light. It's like check points in space which slows down light to it's speed we call C.

May be somewhere in the universe, or within the black hole, space is malleable enough to allow faster than light travel. It's just a concept, but a very interesting one.

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Wanna know the real reason? C is just the maximum floating point value of the computer that our universe's simulation is running on. Similarly, the Planck length is the value closest to zero.

That would perhaps be even more interesting!

More likely, it is the maximum speed the physics engine can handle per tick.

That's exactly my point. If the speed (= distance / tick) is represented by a float, then we can travel no faster than the max float value.

I reasoned about it in the same vein but with a different approach. We are running in a discrete simulation. The most you can move is one space quantum per time tick. That speed is C.

That's beautifully put :)

"3 x 10^8 m/s ought to be enough for anybody"

I recall fragments of a theory that everything moves at the same speed (think multidimensional unit vector), just in various directions (time included as a "direction", explaining why if you travel C in one physical direction "your" time stops).

Perhaps someone can point me to a full description of this theory.

I just like to think of it at the universe's loading screen.

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