Pocketwatch2 said:
[...] It is at this point, I believe that all the matter is very close to the speed of light, where it eventually reaches the speed of light.
Speed is relative and you are treating it here as if it were some absolute velocity. You are adopting a "preferred frame" point of view which is antithetical to the "relativity" of Special and General Relativity.
Relativistically, no matter how close to the speed of light I am relative to you, I am still moving at speed 0 relative to me and I still have to boost an infinite amount to "reach" it.
You speak about what relativity says but you demonstrate your lack of understanding with every sentence.Now let me mention some history which leads us to use "bad" terminology when describing relativistic effects.
---Prior to Einstein's theory it was thought (by many) that light waves traveled via a medium, the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether" just as does sound.
---The Michelson-Morley experiment failed to detect our planet's motion through the aether and many hypotheses were proposed to explain this negative result. One was that matter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_drag_hypothesis" with it so that in the vicinity of the Earth, the aether is stationary.
---Lorentz proposed a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_ether_theory" , in which motion of clocks and rigid bodies through the aether caused slowing of the clocks and contracting of the bodies in just the right way to always yield a null result for a Michelson-Morly type experiment. This is from whence we get the terms "time dilation" and "length contraction" still used in relativity.
---Einstein's insight was that given Lorentz's dilation and contraction effects, the aether itself was impossible to observe. Applying Occam's razor he dispensed with the aether itself and developed SR. Wherein the time dilation and contraction effects, though still just as physically meaningful were not caused by absolute velocities of objects in some universal frame, but rather were relative effects of perspective when considering objects existing in time as collections of space-time events.
So w.r.t. relativity theory. It is not that a moving object contracts, but that a moving object by virtue of its velocity relative to us the object's world-path is hyper-rotated in space-time relative to us so what we think of as a length (in the direction of motion) is for that object an interval through both (its) space and (its) time. In short one is looking at a different cross-section of the object's world line. Saying it contracts is saying the same quantity changes. The fact is that one is measuring something different, not that one is measuring a different value of the same thing.
A Euclidean analogue would be if you were trying to measure the thickness of a telephone pole but you were using a level meter stick while the pole was leaning at an angle. You'd get a bigger number than the "proper thickness". This is a "Euclidean width expansion" analogous but opposite of the pseudo-Euclidean "length contraction" of relativity. (Picture the length of the telephone pole as its time axis so it is like a disk evolving over time, and your "straight up" direction as your own time axis. The pitch of the pole's lean (1/slope=run/rise = dx/dt) is the speed of the "disk" cross section.)
Now the leaning pole is not "fatter" than the vertical pole any more than an object in relativistic motion is shorter than when it is stationary. What is true is that...
* in the analogy
the horizontal cross section of the pole is larger than its proper width, and
*in relativity
the cross section of simultaneous events of the moving objects world line is shorter than its proper length(simultaneous w.r.t. your time).
The reason the behavior is of opposite type has to do with the metric structure of space-time. This you'll best understand by digging into the math of relativity.