A. Light travels in a vacuum at roughly 186,000 miles per second, explained UW-Madison physics professor Daniel Chung. At that speed, you could circumnavigate the globe about 450 times a minute.

But thrilling as this sounds, Einstein 's Special Theory of Relativity unfortunately states that any object with mass, no matter how tiny, needs "an infinite amount of energy to reach the speed of light, " Chung said. "And since we don 't have an infinite amount of energy, it 's never going to happen. "

It is possible, however, to approach the speed of light. In this case, all light as we know it would quickly extinguish both in front of and behind the convertible, Chung said.

He said that as the car would accelerate, the waves of light coming at it would compress together, shortening the wavelengths. Because shorter wavelengths appear blue, it 's called "blueshift. " Meanwhile, the light waves behind the car would spread out, shifting the light toward longer, red wavelengths.

Once the wavelengths shortened and lengthened beyond the visible spectrum that our retinas can perceive, everything would grow dark. But light of shorter wavelengths also contains more energy, which means it could still harm you even if you couldn 't see it, like when invisible ultraviolet (UV) light causes sunburn, Chung says.

With the top down, though, an even bigger problem would be wind.

"As you move faster and faster, the air puts more and more pressure on you, " Chung says. "That would probably do you in way before anything else. "

-- Produced in cooperation with University Communications

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