The only thing faster than light is darkness
In short: Physicists have finally captured something moving faster than the cosmic speed limit. It isn't a particle or a signal, but a tiny void of darkness. These massless points of nothingness can blaze past the speed of light because they carry no energy or information, effectively bypassing the rules of relativity.
In a study published in Nature in 2026, researchers from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology used ultrafast electron microscopy to observe "dark points" within light waves. These entities, known as optical vortices or phase singularities, are essentially tiny holes or "nulls" where the wave's amplitude drops to zero. Because they are points of complete darkness where the peaks and troughs of a wave cancel each other out, they contain no mass, no energy, and no information.
This lack of physical properties is the reason they can bypass Einstein's special theory of relativity. While the speed of light in a vacuum—approximately 299,792,458 meters per second—is the ultimate limit for matter and signals, these singularities are massless voids. They do not violate causality because they do not transmit energy. The experiment confirmed a theoretical prediction from the 1970s: that these vortices can move faster than the waves in which they are formed, much like a whirlpool in a river can move faster than the water's flow.
To witness this, the team used hexagonal boron nitride to create phonon-polaritons—quasiparticles that act like a mixture of light and sound. Because polaritons move about 100 times slower than the speed of light, the researchers could actually track the singularities. They observed how oppositely charged singularities could accelerate each other to superluminal speeds, approaching infinite velocity just before they were annihilated. This discovery provides a universal law shared by fluid flows, sound waves, and complex systems like superconductors.
Beyond the "wow" factor, this research opens doors to studying elusive, high-speed processes in chemistry and biology. It also suggests new methods for encoding quantum information in materials. By capturing these "hidden processes," scientists can observe how nature behaves in its most elusive moments, providing a new lens for fluid dynamics and optics.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Experiment Makes Something Move at 104% of Speed of Light! The Darkness Inside
- Also: Physicists just witnessed pinpricks of darkness moving faster than the speed of light — without breaking the laws of relativity | Live Science
- Also: Novel measurement confirms a 50-year-old prediction: Dark points are faster than light
- Also: What’s faster than light? Darkness | Scientific American
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