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Physics - Speed of light
Expert: Expert - 11/6/2009
Question
light can travel slower in different medium but why not faster?
Answer
The limit of light speed is its own speed in a vacuum. When it is different media (air, glass, water), it travels less than its vacuum speed. In a sense, it DOES travel faster in some media than in others. However, it absolutely can not go faster than its vacuum speed -- that is not only its fastest speed, but the fastest you can transmit information in any manner.
WHY can it go no faster than that? We don't know -- in our Universe, it just doesn't. It would be a fascinating breakthrough to develop a paradigm of our Universe in which we could derive this fact, but (so far) nobody has come close.
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