Alright, TJ, time to clear things up. First off, you need to head over to http://www.mkaku.org/forums/ to talk more about this and get real answers from fully accredited astrophysicists (I am only an astrophysics major, but have 1 more year left).

About matter and having to be an infinite empty void, you need to read up on the Multiverse theory. It pretty much states that there are millions of universes coming into and exiting existence every second. Along these lines, there are also tiny black holes coming into existence and folding under their own gravity in our own backyards.

There is a theory out there about white holes, that they are the other side of a black hole. And the matter that a black hole sucks up is spit into another universe via a white hole. Many theorists think that our universe and the big bang were simply a white hole ejecting matter.

On another note, nothing can be accelerated faster than the speed of light. This is because as you approach the speed of light, it takes an infinite amount of energy to actually reach the speed of light. And if you tried to do that, anything with mass would be stripped down and converted to photons.

And for those of you talking about E=mc^2, you can't relate that to speed of light, its not relativistic. Instead, what you need to use is:

E=umc^2, where u= 1/(sqrt(1-(v^2/c^2))).

If you know anything about math, you can see that as 'v' approaches 'c', 'u' becomes infinite, therefore 'E' also becomes infinite.

Any other questions, feel free to send me a pm or post up here and I'll try to sort through things as logically as possible, or with as much physics, astronomy, quantum mechanics, and relativity as desired.