Ignore quantum entanglement, why would the universe have a speed limit? What is its purpose? I'm majoring in English. So sorry if the answer is obvious.
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The answer is most definitely not obvious.
Space and time are intricately related in a concept called spacetime, and your four-vector (fancy way of saying how fast you travel through spacetime) has a fixed magnitude.
To visualize this, let's simplify things to two dimensions only - one dimension of space and time. Imagine on some Euclidean plane (for the sake of this analogy) where the vertical axis is time, and horizontal axis is one dimension of space. While you are at rest, your four-vector points entirely in the time dimension - it points up. When you decide to move in space, what you are doing is rotating this vector slightly so it has a horizontal component - but notice that, now that you are moving in space, you are moving less in time. To an external observer, your time is dilated.
So what happens when you take it to an extreme? You rotate the vector such that it is horizontal - you are travelling through space at the maximum speed that you can. It turns out that this speed is the speed of light. You'll find that, no matter what you can do, you cannot rotate the vector such that your speed through space is higher - you can turn the vector "more horizontal."
The reason the magnitude of your four-vector is invariant is a whole other matter - I can't go into it except to say that it is the result of the relationship between space and time (you can even view it as a conversion factor between the two).
Unfortunately I see another response stating that mass increases as a function of speed - this idea of relativistic mass is outdated and isn't used any more. Now when we say mass, we mean "rest mass" at all times to avoid confusion; it is momentum that increases.
Space and time are intricately related in a concept called spacetime, and your four-vector (fancy way of saying how fast you travel through spacetime) has a fixed magnitude.
To visualize this, let's simplify things to two dimensions only - one dimension of space and time. Imagine on some Euclidean plane (for the sake of this analogy) where the vertical axis is time, and horizontal axis is one dimension of space. While you are at rest, your four-vector points entirely in the time dimension - it points up. When you decide to move in space, what you are doing is rotating this vector slightly so it has a horizontal component - but notice that, now that you are moving in space, you are moving less in time. To an external observer, your time is dilated.
So what happens when you take it to an extreme? You rotate the vector such that it is horizontal - you are travelling through space at the maximum speed that you can. It turns out that this speed is the speed of light. You'll find that, no matter what you can do, you cannot rotate the vector such that your speed through space is higher - you can turn the vector "more horizontal."
The reason the magnitude of your four-vector is invariant is a whole other matter - I can't go into it except to say that it is the result of the relationship between space and time (you can even view it as a conversion factor between the two).
Unfortunately I see another response stating that mass increases as a function of speed - this idea of relativistic mass is outdated and isn't used any more. Now when we say mass, we mean "rest mass" at all times to avoid confusion; it is momentum that increases.
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Any object with mass cannot travel. According to Einstein and his relativity, as you go faster and faster, we're talking nearing the speed of light, your mass grows. If you ever were to reach the speed of light, your mass would go to infinite, which is not really possible. The other part of the theory is that if you are traveling at 0.9999999999999999999999999999 times the speed of light in a rocket, and you were to sprint forward, time would slow down such that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. They have done experiments with radioactive isotopes that decay in seconds, but when traveling near the speed of light last much, much longer.
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