system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why is the speed of light what it is?

We know that matter can't exceed the speed of light. This is reasonable because as you put in more energy at this point, the matter gains mass and it ends up being this endless loop where you can't put in enough energy to make even a single proton go as fast as light... but then.... why is light stuck at that point? considering light doesn't have mass, shouldn't it be able to go at an infinitely fast speed due to a lack of mass? Why does it move at a limited speed? Why does it happen to be the speed that matter can't move past?
gpt
It's also worth noting that the *speed of light* is something of an incidental misnomer, since light itself isn't fundamentally or qualitatively related to c in any way. It just happens that light was the first thing we discovered that moves at what should probably be termed the *speed of massless vacuum propagation*. We would know it as the *speed of gravity* or the *speed of neutrinos* if we'd happened upon those particles first.