....part of it owing to not understanding the physics of things, and part of it because the pilots of jets/planes and other high speed military craft are not scientists
No.. Most of them aren't scientists. If they're piloting a US military aircraft, you can bet your ass they have a degree, though. While the US military, in general, doesn't usually require that your degree matches the field you operate in, there are far more people who want to be a "fighter pilot" than they have slots for. i.e. they get to be quite choosy.. The USAF (for example) gives heavy consideration to applicants with degrees in STEM fields and even higher consideration to those folks with aeronautical related degrees. Most pilots are actually highly-educated individuals. I don't know what movies you're watching that have given rise to your delusion that pilots are ignorant about the physics and theory behind the planes they operate, at the limits of human endurance. Even if the person coming in doesn't have a great grasp of "science details" on shit like sonic booms and the shock waves created as a jet approaches Mach 1.0, you can bet your ass that student pilot is taught all of that before they are given command of a $100 million fighter jet.
USAF fighter pilot training takes roughly 2.5 to 4 years total after commissioning, including Undergraduate Pilot Training (UPT, ~1 year), Introduction to Fighter Fundamentals (IFF, ~3 months), and the specific fighter aircraft's Basic Course (B-Course, ~9 months)
I'm actually stunned that you would even suggest such a thing... You know how I know? I was there. I enlisted as a technician in the USAF during the first Gulf War. Officers weren't stupid. Some were assholes. Some were inexperienced. Not one was uneducated. I think, even all the way back then, anybody with 2 stars or more had a doctorate degree. If you wanted a colonel's eagle, you better get yourself a master's degree...
That's why you don't see any commercial aircraft at M1+,........
#1. For the love of God, go read up on the CONCORDE. After that, do a quick search on Boom Supersonic's "Overture". For F's sake..... The Concorde is no longer a thing because of cost. Not because they couldn't figure out how to move a 100+ people faster than the speed of sound, without turning them into meat-paste, you goober.
....this is also why like "breaking the speed of light" is impossible, because if you could accelerate past Light Speed, stars would appear to stretch as you start seeing light go backwards toward the star.....
Yes. That's why it's impossible to accelerate past light speed. Because you couldn't see the stars or light would stretch backwards.. Or maybe a shock-wave would build up and damage your spacey-ship. Has nothing to do with E=MC2. (You know, Einstein's energy / mass equivalency equation.) Quantum mechanics in no way suggests that matter cannot equal or exceed light-speed because kinetic energy is real energy. The more kinetic energy an object possesses, the more that energy contributes to its inertia (resistance to changes in velocity). But hey, I was just an enlisted idiot who liked to read books on physics when there wasn't anything compelling on TV..
....Yet the average military person doesn't understand stuff like this.
As a lowly, non-degreed, formerly enlisted idiot, I understand enough to know you to say this: Ah, the irony