system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
If I swing a laser pointer really fast and observe the speed of the laser dot, would it be moving faster than the speed of light at a high enough radial distance?

Let's say I take a laser pointer and start rotating it along and axis perpendicular to the direction of the laser beam would the laser dot break the speed of light at a high enough angular speed or distance?
gpt
Yes, you can easily make the beam move across a distance surface faster than the speed of light by simply pointing the laser at a far away surface and moving it quickly enough. At first this fact may make it seem like we are violating special relativity, but that is not so, since 1) neither light, 2) nor information actually move faster than the speed of light in this scenario.

1) First realize that it is only the laser beam, not light itself that is moving faster than the speed of light. However, the beam is not a physical object but is only a shifting shape defined by the path of the traveling photons. As such, special relativity has nothing to say about the fast the beam can sweep laterally. On the other hand, when you look at the photons, you will see that they still move at the speed of light in that medium.  

2) It's also important to realize that the fact that the beam can scan a surface faster than the speed of light doesn't contradict the idea that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. If you wanted to send a signal using your laser, you would have to do *something* to the laser light, e.g. to turn it on or off. The part of the photon stream affected by this change would only reach that faraway surface at a time given by the separation divided by the speed of light.