my personal headcanon is that the universe is a giant living being and we are its fundamental particles or some other infeasibly tiny thing
idk what that has to do with light speed and space-time but you can think of that yourself i guess
this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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I have had thoughts like that before! Especially since at school the atomic model that was taught looked like a little galaxy (which I now know is inaccurate) and it seemed like going smaller or going bigger just repeated similiar patterns, so to say.
"As above, so below" is a pattern that's almost universally recognized for a reason. The galaxy atom model may not be accurate, but lots of things in the world rhyme at different scales.
Thank you! I used this weird thought to wipe my brain from other weird thoughts, it needed that.
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How to tell people you don't know more than school level basic science: the person who made that image and OP making this thread.
All you did was write "hey, I don't comprehend things that are easily learned and have been freely available to learn from your own home via the Internet for several decades" on a sticky note and put it on yoir forehead, then went into a public place for everyone to see and somehow didn't realise you did any of that.
That's so no matter how much knowledge we gain we can never escape the bad place to kill the Demiurge.
Since nothing can move faster than the speed of light doesn't it also mean that the universe cannot be expanding faster than 2c either?
Not necessarily.
The expansion of the universe here doesn't necessarily mean matter moving faster than light.
Think of the universe as a 3+1 dimensional ballon - specifically, the 3D space we occupy is the 2D surface of the balloon. As you blow air into the ballon, that 2D space expands.
Now, it's a simplistic example mainly because we're three dimensional beings and thus can't easily wrap our heads around a 4D space where one of the surfaces is three dimensional. You run into the same issue as e.g. trying to visualise a tesseract (a four dimensional cube). So a balloon has to do.
And since this expansion of our universe technically happens outside of it, the general laws of physics - such as the speed of light - do not apply.
That's what I meant. Since matter isn't moving at the speed of light, if we assume the universe expansion is due to the movement of its edge objects, then it cannot expand faster than 2c. If the expansion is happening for a different unrelated reason than the edge objects ofc that's something else
Your presumption that there’s an “edge” is at fault here. Consider the surface of the ballon (or rather- a bubble) - it’s continuous, just like our universe. And that’s why it’s hard to explain how a 3D space can expand seemingly without a center point - because said center point is not within the constraints of this 3 dimensional space, just like how the center of a balloon or bubble is not on the two dimensional surface but in the center.
so just like the surface of an expanding bubble, the expansion of our universe doesn’t happen in a plane we can conceptualise easily - it’s a 4 (or possibly more!) dimensional expansion, of which we are just the surface, therefore the expansion appears as if everything literally drifted away from everything - which should be impossible in a 3D space but not when you add a fourth axis.
Fuck it, question that I had since 10 years old.
if I have a very long stick, and I flick it. what would happen to the tip? what if a laser pointer is used? at a certain distance, the beam would be moving (sideways) faster than light.
it might work better with a whip rather than a solid stick.
The end of the stick would respond at the speed of sound travelling through the medium of a stick.
As for the laser pointer, the thing that’s moving faster than light isn’t really a moving thing any more than something appearing in a 24fps film is moving, if you know what I mean? It’s just an abstract notion of a moving dot. The light that comes back to you from above isn’t the same light that’s come back to you from below.
but how will it look like?
for a short scale it'll be a straight line. but a few light years away? where the abstract dot is moving faster than the speed of light? what shape would you see? definitely not a straight line. and definitely some time issues. like it'll hit you and then you'll see it hit other planets you're left and right?
Think of it like a hosepipe. You’re on the lawn with s long stream of water coming out of the hose. If you flick it quickly it doesn’t stay in a straight line. The beam of water curves as you move.
Because the beam of water isn’t an object. It’s a stream of particles which are constantly being emitted from the tip of the hose
Same thing with a laser beam. It’s a stream of photons being emitted from the laser. If you flick the laser, the photons which have already been emitted will continue in a straight line. Any which are emitted during the flick will head off in a straight line in the direction the laser was pointed. End result:a curved beam
that makes sense, but I'm trying to imagine how that beam would look like a few light years away before it hits you, when it hits you, and after.
Now I wish I had a nice big wall about a light second away and a massive laser to draw things on it.
Bonus: angle the wall so that the left side is a light second and the right side is a light minute away. Alternate the laser on/off.
Good news! We do have a nice big wall about a light second away! Hard to find a laser that'll make a visible dot on the moon, though
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The tip of the very long stick would still move at sub light speeds. Also, the atoms at the far end will not immediately know what your hand is doing at the other. The forces the atoms make on each other also travel at (sub) light speed.
I guess imagining a perfect unbendable stick would break physics somewhere else.
First question: two reasons that wouldn't work: the stick would just break, obviously, but if it was a super duper stick, the torque required to accelerate the end past the speed of light is directly related to how long the stick is, so any increase in speed from a longer stick will be offset by the need to apply more force at your end. Therefore the energy required to flick a stick to the speed of light does not depend on the length of the stick, you are simply creating a reverse lever of sorts. It's still an infinite energy requirement, assuming the stick has mass.
The second question is a lot easier. The light is traveling directly away from you at all times, there is no sideways motion.
It's actually simpler: the stick will deform because whatever movement you do travels across the stick at the speed of sound of the material the stick is made out of.
Why does it matter how long it takes for the torque to travel down the stick? The question was about the speed of the tip in the orbital direction, not the speed of the wave in the radial direction outward.
I see your point. Still, it shows there's no such thing as a "super duper stick" because there'd be shearing forces pulling the atoms apart faster than they can move together.
Yeah that's the boring answer, it would just break apart. But even without physical limitations, mass has the property that it can't be accelerared past c with a finite amount of energy, and I think it's interesting to see why that limit is more fundamental than the structure of matter. No matter how you mess with forces using simple machines, the energy calculations always come out the same.
The Information that the stick has begun to move takes time to travel through the stick. Kind of like bending, but not really.
That’s where things get weird. The tip won’t exceed the speed of light. You could have a section near you moving at the speed of light and the tip will also be moving at c, because c is the limit.
If you were on a train moving at 100mph, and threw a baseball at 50mph in the direction of travel, then the baseball is moving at 150mph. But if you were moving at c and threw that baseball it would not go faster than c.
but from the point of view of the guy throwing the ball, the ball will move away from me at c faster than me. but time experienced by all involved would be a mess
In fact, everything would move very very rapidly away from the baseball hitting the first air molecule it touches (assuming you yourself have no mass in this scenario).
A shadow can move faster than light too.