Can anything travel at extra luminal speeds?

Who says the speed of light was the same then as it is now?

IF the Big Bang really happened, the ALL the energy in the universe would have been located in that tiny tiny Singularity. But as soon as it exploded, just a tiny trillionth of a second later, protons would have formed and there would have been gravity.

At that time the Universe would have been only a few INCHES in diameter, so the gravity in the universe would have been REALLY HUGE and focused on ONE SMALL AREA.

We KNOW that a sufficiently large gravitational field CAN actually bend light, so it follows that the extremely humongously unbelievably HUGE amount of gravity in that small space might have slowed the speed of light down to maybe even just a fer miles per hour.

Thus it would have been EASY for those protons to travel faster than light AT THAT TIME, and thus spread out FARTHER then we see them now.

The "Big Bang" was an expansion of space, everywhere, which still continues on to this day. Because of this, the galaxies themselves are not breaking the light speed limit. It 's the actual space between galaxies that is expanding at this "extra-luminal" rate, driven by the force of dark energy. Although the galaxies are being carried along with this rapidly expanding space, they are not physically moving within the fabric of space itself at a pace greater than light speed.

It would be similar to 2 cars traveling down the road each at the posted 70 MPH speed limit, while the road itself is stretching out at a rate of 7,000 MPH. The amount of space between these two cars will increase by a factor of 100 every hour without either car ever exceeding the 70 MPH speed limit.

things can't travel past each other faster than light, but if space is expanding and the objects are separated by sufficient distance, they can have any relative speed. your numbers are approximately right.

as I write this, you have three answers. you might think that we're all saying different things, but we're not really. we're all trying to describe the mathematics of General Relativity (which is fairly unambiguous) in plain english (which can be quite ambiguous).

Since all speeds are relative and light is no exception, yes. The idea that there's a speed limit relates to the mistaken belief that the speed of light is not additive, i.e. not dependant on the speed of it's source. But away from the influence of significant amounts of matter (like planet earth) light's speed *is* additive, hence there can be no speed limit. The reason that the mainstream scientific community believes otherwise is because they foolishly believed that only the electromagnetic fields of a transparent medium could affect light's speed and that creating a vacuum here on earth would avoid any such interference and reveal light's base nature. It does not. The aggregate electromagnetic field of all the earth's charged particles is still present and works to normalise the speed of light from moving sources, i.e. it sets the velocity of the light to a constant with respect to the non-rotating centre of the earth, which has fooled many into believing that light only ever travels at one speed. Light's true nature is revealed through extra-terrestrial observations. Unfortunately light's speed was declared constant before any extra-terrestrial tests had been made so once the contrary evidence arrived, it was ignored...

Back in the sixties, during an inferior conjunction of Venus, i.e. when earth and Venus are at their closest, powerful radar signals were bounced off Venus from multiple radar stations around the globe simultaneously. This was done in order to look for a time dilation effect relating to General Relativity, but a guy called Bryan G. Wallace took the opportunity to test the more fundamental postulate of Special Relativity, the constancy of light. By comparing the travel times of the radar signals from different locations on the earth he found that these signals were a better fit for a source-dependant model for light. These signals seemed to have a component of the velocity of the earth's rotation in the direction of Venus added to their velocities, i.e. they had a speed of c+v. The scientific community didn't want to hear this though and turned a blind eye to Wallace's findings. Relativity had become more like a religion than science. No career-minded physicist could be seen to be paying heed to a "relativity-denier". The mainstream scientific community carried on believing in the fallacy that the speed of light is always constant.

There have since been other astronomical observations that hint at a variable speed of light, like this: http://news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?i...

...but such observations are seen as some minor curiosity and the theorists will bend over backwards to invent any kind of fantastical nonsense to explain them so that they can avoid ditching Einsteinian Relativity.

The time-dilation seen in type 1a supernova is likely down to light's speed being source-dependent too (rather than expanding spacetime!). And many apparently variable stars may well be binaries in which light bunching is occurring as faster light emitted from a star moving at it's maximum velocity towards us in it's orbit catches up with slower light it emitted earlier: http://www.datasync.com/~rsf1/binaries.htm

There is no mass increase with velocity either. It is only charged particles in a particle accelerator that become more difficult to accelerate with increasing velocity, i.e. as they approach the propagation speed of the accelerating field (c with respect to the static accelerator). Nothing to do with increasing mass. This page gives the common sense explanation: http://www.alternativephysics.org/book/Relativisti... (specifically the "Wind Tunnel" section)

Although travelling faster than light is theoretically possible (as long as you aren't using invalid theories), interstellar travel at such speeds would still be a challenge as the low-density matter of the interstellar medium would create significant drag even at small fractions of c so a spacecraft would still have a maximum speed set by the level of thrust that can be achieved, much like a jet aeroplane in earth's atmosphere.

Not in absolute terms. However, in relative terms, yes. This occurs because the outermost galaxies are in non-inertial frames of reference as regards to us, the observers, and light speed is only limited in an inertial frame of reference. This allows for the apparent extraluminal speeds.

You are an idiot on 9/11! I did not ask for your opinion George W. Bush!