QUESTION:  Is it possible to travel at the speed of light?

ANSWER from Ted Dunham on November 13th, 1995:
Hmm - As far as we know it is not possible to travel at the speed of light
unless you are a massless particle like a photon.  In that case, you can't
stop!  Here's the deal - As you put more and more energy into making
something go faster, you end up giving it more energy as its speed
approaches the speed of light, but its speed just gets closer and closer to
the speed of light, never quite reaching it.  This is what is predicted by
the special theory of relativity, and is exactly what is seen in particle
accelerators.  It seems illogical because this behavior isn't what we
normally see in our everyday lives since we never get to speeds even
remotely close to the speed of light, but it really does happen.
Accelerators wouldn't work if relativity wasn't a good description of how
things really act at high energies.

That's not to say that it is totally impossible to find a way to cheat.  It
might be possible to make use of nasty structures in the Universe, like
black holes, to be able to send information to distant parts of the
Universe in a time much less than the time it would take light to get there
by the normal route.  We don't have a clue how to do this, but there is a
possibility that it might be workable so we shouldn't give up hope yet.