For more than a century, the speed of light has held an almost sacred place in physics, It was a constant that ordered many relationships between matter and time. Nothing can travel faster than it. Not a spaceship, not a radio signal, not a charged particle of energy. That was one of Albert Einstein’s most famous conclusions.
Basically this is because, as an object accelerates, Its relative mass increases and requires more and more energy. Thus, to reach the speed of light, an infinite amount of energy would be needed.which is physically impossible. This is due to Einstein’s famous theory of relativity which states that the energy you use to move an object is partially converted into mass. This does not mean that the object increases in size or that the number of its atoms changes, only its relativistic mass and inertia change.
To date, no observation has been able to refute it. Or perhaps we should speak in the past tense: A team of scientists, led by Ido Kaminer, have observed something that appears to move faster than light. This is not a new particle, nor an exotic quantum phenomenon. It is just the opposite: darkness or more precisely vacuum vortexes.
The authors of the study, published in Nature, explain it with an analogy: “To understand how the darkness overtakes the light, imagine “a mighty river, the flowing water represents the wave of light, but in the middle of the channel there is a whirlpool and it moves faster than the flow of the river.”.
How is it possible? Einstein established that the speed of light in a vacuum is the maximum speed limit, however, relativity applies this restriction specifically to matter with mass and signals that transmit energy or information. The vortices observed by Kaminer’s team are massless and carry no energy or information, meaning they do not technically violate Einstein’s principle.
So what exactly are these entities? The study points out that These light vortices are “zero points” or “nulls” within light waves: places where the amplitude of the wave is reduced to zero. In simpler terms, they are points of total darkness embedded in the light field. As strange as it sounds.
To observe this phenomenon, Kaminer’s team built a unique microscopy system capable of capturing even the fastest and smallest phenomena. By integrating a laser system with an advanced optomechanical setup into a specialized electron microscope, they achieved unprecedented temporal and spatial resolution.
“We believe that these innovative microscopy techniques will allow us to study hidden processes in physics, chemistry and biology, revealing for the first time how nature behaves in its fastest and most elusive moments.”, concludes Kaminer in a statement. This advance does not prove that Einstein was wrong but rather something more interesting: more than a century later, his ideas continue to challenge us to ask new questions.