The Speed of Light?

THe night before last I must have been having some corking dreams, because I woke up this morning with a question that I would love an answer to.

'How does the quantum foam effect the speed of light?'.

For my readers who are not physicists, let me break this question down.

The 'quantum foam' is a descriptive term for the fact that there really is no such thing as a vacuum. Due to the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics even in a space where all matter as we recognise it has been removed, particles continually pop in and out of existence. Energy is conserved because these particles disappear as rapidly as they appear.

This being the case, I wondered whether the speed of light is in some way determined by it's interaction with this quantum foam.

A side query is whether the increase in mass associated with objects moving relatively faster (most obvious as the speed of light is approached) is in some way connected with interactions with this foam. as masses move faster relatively speaking, they sweep out more and more space, vastly increasing their chance of interacting with these virtual particles.