Imagine you’re in a car driving across the country watching the landscape. A tree in the distance gets closer to your car, passes right by you, then moves off again in the distance behind you. Of ...

So, you’re driving a car at half the speed of light. (Both hands on the wheel, please.) You turn on the headlights. How fast would you see this light traveling? What about a person standing by the ...

Science fiction authors and readers dream of travelling at the speed of light, but Einstein tells us we can’t. You might think that’s an arbitrary rule, but [FloatHeadPhysics] shows a different way to ...

If there is an absolute law in the universe, it’s that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. For science-fiction enthusiasts, that’s a bit depressing. Space is big, and while the speed of ...

The most distant galaxies in this deep field image from the James Webb Space Telescope appear as small, faint dots—and are receding from us faster than the speed of light due to cosmic expansion. If ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

When I was a teenager, I was—shockingly, I know—deeply nerdy. At a science-fiction convention, I bought a button that read, “186,282 miles/second: Not just a good idea, it’s the law.” It was poking ...

Einstein’s claim that the speed of light is constant has survived more than a century of scrutiny—but scientists are still daring to test it. Some theories of quantum gravity suggest light might ...

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com. Why does time change when traveling close to the ...