"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." - Terry Pratchett
He’s referring to the fact that if you sweep a laser pointer across the moon, the dot can easily move faster than light. This is not proscribed by physics, nor are similar phenomena like the phase velocity of a wave exceeding the speed of light. None of these things allow you to transmit information faster than light.
Another fun example besides projections like laser pointers or the spot of a searchlight on the clouds is the junction between blades of scissors. Almost all the examples one sees of this relate to synchronization defined entities not being physical objects. In my experience explaining this, the larger scale of the searchlight on the clouds seems to help people "get it".
To really kill the illusion, imagine a long line of people, doing "The Wave". The wave can move arbitrarily fast as the delay between people decreases, and even infine speed! (everyone does their part at the same time, assuming they have synced clocks and aren't dependent on their neighbor for the trigger, which is the key feature of the faster-than-light illusion.)
That's also a good one! ..Basically a sub-example of "phase velocity" mentioned in the greatgrandparent. Imagining oneself as an active participant in The Wave seems like it would boost saliency a lot. I'll try that one next time. :)
The moon is a little more than 0.1 light seconds in diameter. Any wag that took more than a tenth of a second to traverse the moon's surface would be moving slower than the speed of light across it. There's no way the ponderous wag displayed in the video was moving so quick. At best, it was moving half the speed of light across it.
What would really be interesting of the things mentioned in the video linked from the stackoverflow question, would be how a perceiver would see the closing scissors occur.
If you were 12 light years from the handle end of the scissors, and only 2 light years from the tips, if the closing motion took a year to occur, you would see the point move backwards from the tip to the handles, since the light would take longer to reach you to see the handles close than the tips.
Not really true. You can definitely falsify someone else's hypothesis without positing one of your own.
This is more of how it should be done in business/politics – not very helpful to say "this is the wrong way to do it" but not propose a better solution. In science, however, falsify things is always useful.
It is a common misconception. You can't falsify anything without your own theory. Some people just can't (at the conscious level) recognize their assumptions (if you don't see air, it doesn't mean there is none).
Hypotheses make predictions. Experimentation can test those predictions without providing an alternative explanation for the phenomena you are testing.
For example, if I came up with a theory of gravity that implied everything should fall towards the earth at the same speed, all you need to do to falsify my theory is show that this is not the case. You do not need to know that wind resistance is the confounding variable to know that the theory which suggests everything should fall at the same speed is wrong.