We might like to concern ourselves with the speed of propagation of information.
Essentially when you peer into General Relativity, you will find that light travels along paths called
geodesics, which are straight lines along curved space. In fact, a geodesic can be reverse-defined
as those paths that light travels along. A simple way to understand geodesics is to look at a map of the Earth.
Draw a straight line on the 2D map, and when the same line is drawn on the 3D spherical globe, it is curved. Draw a straight line on the sphere (e.g. the Equator, or every line of longitude/latitude, every Great Circle) and vice versa, it is curved on the 2D projection. The true straight line is the Equatorial line. In fact airlines make specific use of this phenomenon to save a lot of money on fuel.
Now when we look at time dilation effects in relativity, we see that the faster you travel through space, the slower through time. If you go X m/s in space, then 1/X m/s is what you will go through in time so to speak (Lorentz factor).
Going absolutely fastest through space, time freezes and becomes non-existent, exactly as if stretching a triangle to infinity turns it into a straight line of sorts. The angles that disappeared of the triangle would be what we see as the "time" dimension.
Velocity is less meaningful here than a term called '
Rapidity'. Rapidity is really what we call colloquially as "speed". When we say "that is fast" or "that is slow", we really mean that it has high or low rapidity. The speed of light c, is infinite when considered as rapidity. This is elegant.
In fact, the usage of "velocity" is totally misleading and a fatal flaw of science's attempt to explain itself to the layman. We should have been looking at 'rapidity' all along. When we say the "speed of light is 299792458m/s", this poses a question "why 299792458?", to which the answer is merely that someone made it up on the spot. But when someone is told that the rapidity of light is infinite, then all questioning ceases, their bellies are satiated.
Now what relevance does this have? Well, to say that the speed of light is the fastest speed, becomes clear in rapidity terms. The path traced by a lightspeed entity is a true straight line, a geodesic through spacetime. The higher in rapidity you go, the "straighter" your path, until you reach perfect straightness at infinite rapidity. So the idea that anything can go faster than light is like the idea that there can be something straighter than a straight line, an idea which dissolves itself as inherently meaningless.
As regards those photons which have been "delayed" a few split seconds, such questions are meaningless. People need to get it into their head that the "speed of light" is not going to change. It is invariant because it is the very fabric of space, not because something called a photon
"travels" "in space". You can't go faster or slower than space itself, so more appropriately we should call it the speed of spacetime, or the
speed of information. I can promise you that even if the speed of light appears to change, the speed of information will never be altered; because questions of its "speed" are meaningless.
Hope this helps.
