[virgilp]

It's perfectly correct and does not contradict physics. Think about it in the opposite direction - say you have a perfect laser, with perfect pointing ability. You pick two planets that are far away from each other but at roughly the same distance from Earth, and make an angle of 10 degrees with it; it will take you a few seconds to "move" the laser 10 degrees and thus move the spot from one planet to the other - in the process making the spot "travel" millions of light years in a few seconds. However, the light itself has not traveled at faster-than-light speeds (it still takes a lot of years for the light from your laser pointer to reach any one of those two planets).

[jdmichal]

There's two possible interpretations here. The implication of "shadows travel faster than light" is that information about the lack of light is faster. This interpretation is false. In your thought experiment, the information of the lasers moving still only travels at speed of light, even if the actual movement took only a fraction of that time. So the "shadow" on Earth reacts at the speed of light to changes in the source.

However, if the idea is that a laser that is continuously lit can "sweep" a path, such that the laser dot appears to move faster than light could travel that same path... Then of course that's trivially true. The light is traveling the radius of the arc, not the length.

[TotempaaltJ]

> It's perfectly correct and does not contradict physics.

Sure, this is correct, but I don't see how this describes anything traveling faster than light. The light spot itself is an effect of the light that's traveled to that point (at the speed of light). The spot "moving" is (physically) more of an illusion as the light now travels to an adjacent location.

As far as I understand it doesn't actually move