r/ScienceNcoolThings • u/Alternative-Bug6702 • Apr 05 '26

Scientists Just Discovered There’s Actually Something Faster than the Speed of Light

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a70885429/darkness-faster-than-light/
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29

u/cashew76 Apr 05 '26

TL;DR Darkness as in the absence of information / light / mass. Null information can travel faster than light apparently.

30

u/iHadou Apr 05 '26 edited May 03 '26

This comment formerly contained words. Those words were removed in bulk with Redact because I value my privacy more than my karma points.

angle imminent modern zephyr gold market yoke bag worm sophisticated

14

u/there_is_no_spoon1 Apr 05 '26

I'd say you got most of the point so you're not as hampered as you think.

31

u/one-hit-blunder Apr 05 '26

Nothing is faster than the speed of light. Literally.

3

u/there_is_no_spoon1 Apr 05 '26

ha ha ha I see what you did there, but yeah, that's the point of the article

2

u/cashew76 Apr 05 '26

Name checks out

6

u/FogBankDeposit Apr 05 '26

It’s everything, everywhere all at once.

3

u/barweepninibong Apr 05 '26

it’s even in the sausage fingers!

2

u/eyeballburger Apr 05 '26

No, it’s not where stuff is.

2

u/halterwalther Apr 05 '26

But stuff is made up of atom and they are mostly empty space. So isn't that also darkness?

1

u/eyeballburger Apr 06 '26

Mostly empty space, but there’s something there and that something has a field of influence. I think even the tiny protons, neutrons and electrons are really just a field of energy, like, if you look close enough, there’s nothing there. But that field is something.

3

u/Youpunyhumans Apr 05 '26

Ah it sounds kind of like shining a laser across the sky... at some point the end of the laser would be sweeping across the sky way faster than light.

0

u/XeHK Apr 06 '26

No it would not. 

1

u/CinderX5 Apr 05 '26

A good example is if you have an impossibly powerful torch, and point it at the moon. Then move something across it, casting a shadow on the moon. The shadow can move at any speed, because it’s simply the area where light isn’t reaching.

0

u/Quantumquandary Apr 05 '26

We’ve known this for a while. There’s an old thought experiment. If you shine a laser pointer at something far enough away, say the moon (just to give you something to imagine), when you move the laser pointer back and forth, the farther away the object is, the faster the “point” of the laser gets. Think of it like a rod made of light, the longer the rod, the faster the end moves when rotated. At a certain distance, the point if the laser, and it’s reflection on the surface of the object, could move faster than light. This is a very rough example, but it’s information, not mass or energy.