All is well, now. Nothing is faster than the speed of light.
Well, you're right, and then again not...
The tricky thing about this whole "speed-of-light" speed limit, is that for the longest time, people (scientists included) believed that the speed of light is constant. And although this may or may not be true, it is very hard to disprove, and increasingly easy to verify. But it all depends on where you are in the event/observer equation...
Speed is a tricky thing is a relativistic universe. If an object is moving quickly (approaching the speed of light) then to outside observers, it will appear to be moving very fast. But to the object itself, and any theoretical observers that are traveling with that speedy object, things are just humming along at a "normal" speed. And in fact, as that object and it's passengers get closer and closer to the speed of light, things actually slow down for them on their local timeline, even though to an outside observer it looks like they are moving REALLY fast. Einstein came up with some REALLY wacked-out theories, and most of them have been proven pretty definitively in the intervening decades...
What most physicists seem to forget is that light, like any other particle/wave propagates through any media at differing speeds, depending on the density and propagation properties of that media. There have been some experiments that show that light is subject to "slowdown" or "speeding up" much like sound through media of differig densities. Since most of the "open" parts of th universe are relatively uniform in their density (near-vacuum) it is nearly impossible to sense in nature,a nd since the propagation media densities required to speed up light are essentially non-existent in today's universe, this is something that cn only really be studied in theory. However, a good argument has been made that the relative speed of light (the light that we, as outside observers) can detect is not entirely as it may seem, especially with the very early stages after the "Big Bang", when the density of the time/space of the universe was MUCH greater than it is today...
Theoretical physics is a weird world, and has been proving for nearly half a century that almost everything you think you know about reality is untrue. Unfortunately, most people never are exposed to this information, and most of Mankind is still blundering through life with an understanding of reality that is barely more sophisticated than that of Neolithic man...
One interesting implication of these "faster than light" theories, and the "non-local communication" experiments in high-energy particle physics is that they are actually confirming that things like psychic phenomena and "magic" may in fact be viable disciplines. The ability to effect th euniverse around us with mere thought is just a short leap, philosophically speaking, from photons "communicating" across long distances at faster-than-light speeds. The Media never really addresses this, because it's something that most people just aren't really ready to accept, But after 3 decades of Star Trek and other sci-fi, ideas like "time travel" and "transporters" are something the general public has been programmed to grok. Plus, those sorts of applications require technology, and so their implementation can be easily controlled by controlling access to such machines.
Harnessing these fundamental characteristics of sub-atomic particles on the macro scale, though--now THAT is something that has massive, dangerous, and reality-changing implications for mankind. First of all, if we could control our own matter, and the matter around us, just with our own minds, it would change the very nature of society as we know it on every level imaginable...
Just think of the mayhem that would ensue if large segments of the population were suddenly made aware that they had, as part of their elementary biology, the ability to communicate with other people across vast distances with nothing more than a thought, or that they had the ability to control the composition of fundamental matter with their mind. Imagine the crash in the telecom market this would cause. Imagine how much of an impact this would have on the financial sector, if people could, quite literally, make their own gold by mentally controlling the sub-atomic configuration of base matter.
And physics has, essentially, told us that these things are in fact not merely possible, but are a fundamental property of sub-atomic particles. And just like everything else in the universe, we human beings are made up of these weird little packets of energy. Imagine the possibilities if we could harness the fundamental properties of our own atoms.
The possibilities stagger the imagination...
