FTL Travel possibilities?

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

But then again, why would the Universe care about that? Just because you want it to be like that?

Why do you think the universe "cares"? It's just a complex mechanism that we already manipulate on a small scale.

 

[arjan de lumens]

There is a theory that people who work within a field tend to be to tied stongly into it's accepted tennants. The really big jumps happen from people at the edge of these fields (or possibly from other related areas of expertise) who are thinking about things in non-standard ways or from unusual angles. They come up with ideas that are initially dismissed or rubbished by the mainstream, and then gradually accepted as their validity catches on.

While this it true to a considerable extent, the problem in practice is that people working outside the mainstream tend to be something like

• A quite small group of absolutely brilliant geniuses, producing truly great new insights.
• A larger group of people who think they are geniuses, but upon closer inspection turn out only to have made the same ideas/discoveries as other people before them (this is depressingly common if you don't pay continuous attention to research results in your targeted field).
• A still larger group of people that are no more than just crackpots, stringing together random ideas and then arguing forcefully that they have reached some sort of cosmic truth.