Physics education research, electronic materials, and the musings of Christopher Moore, Ph.D.

But then how can you run faster than light if light itself is energy and if you have run faster than energy itself, how will you run?

Questioner wrote:

I was just wondering if the people on the ground would see me disappear as I would be relatively running faster than them. I was at running speed relative to the machine and so I figure it would be possible.

You seem to have missed my point: Yours is a question that asks "What is the answer to a question that has no answer?"

Any question that asks about events that would occur at velocities at or beyond the speed of light is a question that asks about events that would flow from an impossible event. At best, such questions have no definitive answers; at worst, they have no answers at all. Such questions are ill-formed conundrums, logically no different than the question "How many angels can stand on the head of a pin?"

That is not to say that one shouldn't entertain such questions. In fact, they can be useful as part of a "gedankenexperiment" (thought experiment) such as the one that Einstein claimed he carried out as a 16-year-old and which ultimately led to his development of Special Relativity:

"If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), I should observe such a beam of light as a spatially oscillatory electromagnetic field at rest. However, there seems to be no such thing, whether on the basis of experience or according to Maxwell's equations. From the very beginning it appeared to me intuitively clear that, judged from the standpoint of such an observer, everything would have to happen according to the same laws as for an observer who, relative to the earth, was at rest.  For how, otherwise, should the first observer know, i.e., be able to determine, that he is in a state of fast uniform motion? One sees that in this paradox the germ of the special relativity theory is already contained."

But to attempt to do otherwise—i.e., to attempt to actually answer such questions—is to attempt to count those angels standing on the head of that pin.

We cannot travel faster than light.. however if we could... we would indeed oscillate through the time dimension.