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What if you could go faster than the speed of light?

According to relativity, time slows down as you approach the speed of light. What would happen if you go faster than the speed of light? Would time go in reverse?

Short answer: you can't go faster than the speed of light. Asking what would happen if you travel faster than light is like asking what would happen if you could grow spaghetti noodles out of your head instead of hair. It's not even plausible, and there are a lot of good reasons why not.

However, let's throw aside all the limitations of time and space and assume that you could somehow do the impossible. As far as time is concerned, yes, you would most likely travel backward in time. In fact, some physicists have hypothesized the existence of particles they call tachyons. If these particles exist (and don't get excited...there's no direct evidence that they do) they could only travel faster than light, never slowing down below light speed. Stable tachyons would represent quite a problem for the universe as we think we understand it; they would in theory allow you to send messages back in time and violate causality. Fortunately for our framework, they probably don't exist, or if they do, they cannot interact with the slower-than-light universe in any meaningful way.

So why can't you travel faster than light? It's not only time that is affected by relativistic speed, but mass and length as well. As you approach c, the speed of light, your mass grows greater and your length contracts along your path of travel. If you could touch the speed of light (you can't!) your mass would become infinite and your length would become zero (as measured by a stationary observer). From YOUR perspective, the entire universe outside your spaceship would shrink to a dimensionless point while you seemed fine. Relativity is a strange thing.

I hope that helps. Good luck!

EDIT: To dave below...but when you travel through a wormhole, if such things exist, you're not traveling faster than light. You're traveling at sublight speeds through a region of space that has been distorted to the point that it brings two distant points together. The same is true for riding a space bubble. You're bending space to carry you where you want to go...not traveling through space faster than light. There's a subtle but very important difference.

To further illustrate; there are most likely galaxies beyond our observable horizon that are moving away from us faster than the speed of light, but the galaxies themselves are essentially motionless with respect to the fabric of space. It's the SPACE that's expanding; they're just along for the ride. And there's nothing that says that two points in space cannot separate faster than light, if they are sufficiently distant.