Darkness Can Move Faster Than Light Without Breaking the Laws of Physics

Einstein can be at ease, relativity still stands.

Physicists have experimentally confirmed a strange prediction: the dark “holes” inside light waves can appear to move faster than light itself. But Einstein’s laws still stand as darkness isn’t a particle or a wave, nor does it carry any information. The darkness here is called a phase singularity — a point where the wave cancels out and the field goes dark.

Using a special ultrafast electron microscopy setup, researchers showed that this darkness can move at about 1.04 times faster than the speed of light. That does not violate relativity, because darkness isn’t carrying mass, energy, or information.

Faster than the Fastest

Light moves at a whopping 299,792,458 meters per second. For comparison, the fastest human runners can “only” run at about 12.4 m/s, while the fastest car ever made can reach some 341 m/s. The fastest man-made object with confirmed velocity, the Parker Solar Probe, reached 192,220 m/s. That’s stunning, but still more than a thousand times slower than light.

But light isn’t just incredibly fast; it’s the fastest possible speed in the universe.

To accelerate objects with mass, you need energy. The faster you want it to go, the more energy you need to use to accelerate it. Reaching light speed would require infinite energy, so objects can approach light speed but never reach or exceed it.

Signals are also limited by light speed because faster-than-light information would break the cause-and-effect. In some frames of reference, a faster-than-light message could arrive before it was sent. Information itself, in any shape or form, can never travel faster than light.

Darkness, however, is a bit different.

Darkness isn’t a particle, photon, or signal racing through space. In this case, the darkness came from phase singularities: points in a wave where the phase becomes undefined, like the calm eye of a storm in a swirling field. Opposite charges can meet and vanish, much like particle–antiparticle pairs.

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How Do You Even Measure This?

In the new study, researchers directly measured these optical singularities as they were born, moved, and annihilated inside a very specific setup (a membrane of hexagonal boron nitride). Their key result was that just before annihilation, some singularities appeared to accelerate past the speed of light.

Imagine ocean waves crossing each other. In some spots, one wave’s crest meets another wave’s trough, and the water briefly goes flat. In light, something similar can happen. That zero-point is the darkness the researchers tracked.

These singularities flicker and collide on scales too small and too fast for ordinary optical tools. The team used an ultrafast transmission electron microscope and a technique called free-electron Ramsey imaging to reconstruct the amplitude and phase of the field frame by frame.

Inside the boron nitride membrane, light couples to vibrations of atoms to form something called phonon polaritons. These are hybrid waves of light and matter that can be squeezed into shorter wavelengths, which makes them move slower. That slowing helped the researchers track the singularities and see that darkness moved faster than light.

To put it simply, the researchers made a “movie” of the light wave’s geometry, found the dark zeroes inside of it, and measured how fast those zeroes went from one frame to the next. This is an apparent measurement, but one that offers valid experimental proof nonetheless.

This was not unexpected; in fact, for decades, physicists had predicted that this would happen. But theory can only be demonstrated by experiment.

Why This Matters

It’s really cool to have actual evidence that darkness can move faster than light, but beyond the “What travels faster than light” riddles, this actually matters.

The biggest breakthrough here is probably having a setup that can measure something like this. This means they can map nanoscale topological defects that appear in superfluids, superconductors, acoustic waves, fluid flows, and other wave systems. The authors argue that their microscopy approach could help reveal hidden processes in physics, chemistry, and biology at previously unreachable timescales. The work could also improve electron microscopy itself.

Meanwhile, Einstein’s theory (and our understanding of the universe) still stands. Nothing material can outrun light and no information can escape causality. But the universe permits a subtler kind of speed: the motion of absence can race faster than the light around it.

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Darkness, as a pattern, can move faster than light.