Question: Why did it take so long for scientists to prove that albert einstein theory about nothing could travel faster than the speed of light might not be true?

Pete Etchells answered on 27 Apr 2012:

Hi ells8! One of the important things about science is that it is very difficult – if not impossible – to ‘prove’ that something does or doesn’t happen. Proving something basically means that you’ve found out something to be absolutely, 100% true. Science doesn’t really work that way; for the most part, we’re trying to find out really difficult things, and sometimes, we might be wrong. Therefore, the best we can do is to try and find evidence that supports our theory, so that we might be a bit more confident that what we’re saying is correct.

As an example, say I come up with a theory that all swans in the world are white. There’s two ways that I can go about proving that this is true – one would be to find every single swan in the world, and see if it’s white. The other way would be to look for evidence that it’s not true (which is MUCH easier); I only need to find one black swan, and I’ve shown that my theory is incorrect. The trouble with the first way, is that I might have missed a black swan somewhere in the world, so I can never be entirely sure that I’ve exhausted all the possibilities.

Einstein’s theory about faster-than-light travel is kind of like this example in reverse (and harder!). We can show that lots of things can easily travel slower than the speed of light, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something, somewhere, that can travel faster than it. So, like finding the black swan, the easier option (in theory) is to try and find something that CAN travel faster than light. The trouble with that is that we’ve probably not got advanced enough technology at the moment to actually find an answer. An experiment at the Large Hadron Collider last year showed evidence that something might be able to go faster than light, but the results have since been shown to be down to a mistake in some of the calculations.

So at the moment, we don’t have any hard evidence that Einstein’s theory is false. But that certainly doesn’t mean that it actually IS false – just that we need to keep looking!