The effects of aberration and the Doppler Effect. Source: Comic Vine
During one of the first class sessions, we were given a minute or so to write down what would happen if the speed of light was only 100 mph. I’d never really thought about this before, so I struggled to get anything more than “The light from the Sun would take forever to reach us” and “it would be cold”, so I figured this would be a good time to tweak the question and ask “What would happen if we traveled at the speed of light?”
There are a couple of really strange consequences that would occur if you were to travel at the universal speed limit. The first is called time dilation, where time moves slower for someone moving at higher speeds. Let’s say you moved at 90% the speed of light, your watch would show 10 minutes have passed but to an outside observer, 20 minutes have actually gone by. The next two consequences will distort your vision, and you’ll see something like the image above. The first cause behind this vision change is due to aberration, which is where you would essentially get tunnel vision. This view occurs because the photons around you all appear to be coming from in front of you, even any behind you. I believe this makes sense because these massless photons move at the speed of light and if you traveled faster than them, in the split second you saw them, they would appear as a streak in your view. I imagine this as someone moving during a series of photos, where they’re blurred in each. The other vision-changer is the Doppler Effect, which causes the light from everything in front of you to bunch together and appear blue, as show in the picture. All the light behind you would actually spread out and appear red. If your speed were to continue increasing, the light would appear to shift out of your view and fade into the darkness.
Now, this is actually impossible because of Einstein’s equation E=MC^2, where energy and mass are the same thing. Since E and M are the same, you can conclude that the faster an object goes, the more mass it will have (and this of course only happens at realllllly high speeds). So if an object were to travel at the speed of light, it would have infinite mass and you would need an infinite amount of energy to actually move that object, which is sadly why this is impossible, for now.
I got this information from a good piece at How Science Works, that explained this topic very well.
