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As much sense as it might make for the universe and its myriad life-fostering properties, it's annoying to have a limit such as c, the speed of light in a vacuum. There are lots of limits and constants in the cosmos, really, but the speed of light is just so there, keeping us humans from our most fervent sci-fi dreams: time travel, instantaneous communication, deep-space exploration. c is the rule, the most fundamental rule, that enforces loneliness in the universe.

And so we take notice of even the unlikeliest suggestions for getting around it, as when researchers at CERN clocked neutrinos, moving between its base on the Swiss-French border and an underground laboratory in Italy, at faster than light speed. Those results were, of course, bunk, but we all took a moment to dream of the possibilities, even with a full century of good science declaring in no uncertain terms that we shouldn't even consider such a reality.

Quantum physics has, however, come up with some intriguing simulations or approximations of faster-than-light phenomena. There is first this notion of entanglement, in which two particles or groupings of particles can be linked over a distance (up to 143 km in the most recent experiments), such that some action taken on a particle (a measurement, usually) is reflected in the other particle. It's not really faster-than-light communication, though, as a classical, slower-than-light back-channel is still needed in order to interpret the information gathered from the second, distant particle.

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