Space Travel, Part 8 — What's the Deal with the Speed of Light?

(Still waffling on whether this should be Space Travel part 8 or Relativity part 1; we'll see...
If you want to go back to part 1, that's here though none of the prior material really matters for this one.)

It's weird to me how everybody knows there's a problem.

How, if you are, say, Issac Asimov or George Lucas or Gene Roddenberry trying to write your Galactic Empire/Federation/Whatever story, you've got to do some kind of handwave about Relativity. We know this because we were taught at some early age that trying to go faster than lightspeed is Somehow Bad, even if nobody ever explains the details.

It's particularly annoying to me because many of the details actually could be explained without going beyond 6th grade math. If you get how right triangles work, that's pretty much all you really need for Special Relativity, except nobody seems to bother trying.

I suppose part of the problem here is the mystique of General Relativity. True story:

Arthur Eddington is at a meeting of Royal Society in 1919 where Sir J.J. Thomson (President) concludes a talk saying nobody's ever really stated in clear language what Relativity is about. The meeting disperses, Ludwig Silberstein (the author of one of the early books on relativity) comes up to Eddington and essentially says, "So you must one of three people in the world who actually get this stuff." Eddington demurs, but Silberstein pushes further, "C'mon, don't be modest," at which point Eddington replies, "Actually, I'm trying to think who #3 is..."

Then again, given the sheer number of people I've encountered who have Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's Gravitation sitting on their bookshelves, that's clearly not the case anymore.

But if even Albert Fucking Einstein had to take five years off to get up to speed on Differential Geometry — which to some extent is just the Partial Differentiation Chain Rule on Steroids and working through all of the various consequences, but if you didn't get past high school calculus, even that much is going to be a bit hard to take — what hope is there for the rest of us ordinary mortals?

But it so happens that, for Special Relativity, you don't need differential geometry. So let's get started:

Why is the speed of light constant?

How did they even get this idea that the speed of light is always the same? That's the part They never explain. They figure there's no way anybody's going to get that without having the full-ass physics course, so they don't bother trying.

The short answer is that they've done the experiments and that's the way it actually is. Since that's unsatisfying, I'm going to try giving you the half-assed physics course instead:

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