"Can you, at the risk of p-ing off InselPeter, also explain these new theories regarding the speed of light as not being the 'speed limit' for the universe?"
I'm afraid not. It's way outside my area of expertise - in fact, all of this is (well, except for the Goedel stuff, which is almost comprehensible).
I work with a crapload of PhDs in various fields, though, and I sent a query to one of my buds several months back asking about this and recieved no reply. He got his physics degree from BU about a million years ago, so he's kinduva curmudgeony, old fart, and usually busy, but sometimes he'll give me the time of day. (Actually, he's a really nice - crotchety - guy, but he's pretty busy.)
I recall an article I read decades ago about a model of tachyon, tardyon, and photon universes. Tachyon is FTL, Tardyon is STL (slower than light). Each universe is tardyon wrt itself, but tachyon with respect to the other universe. After I read the article (smithsonian? SciAm?), I wasn't sure whether this was just a curiosity derived from a mathematical excursion, or something someone was seriously proposing. I pretty much forgot about it till a few months ago when I read about the experiment where the guys had apparently achieved FTL communication - a clear violation (FTL is not impossible, according to Martin Gardner, it's FTL with transfer of information that's impossible). However, I don't think the experimenters themselves believe they (Wang, et. al.) achieved FTL communication. If I recall, they were very skeptical and seemed to indicate it was some sort of artifact of their experimental design. Really, I didn't understand this very well when I read it, and my memory sucks, so it's anybody's guess what they really meant. If you look for it, you might be able to find it on the web. Maybe you can make more sense of it than I could. (I can't find my old email to my friend on it.)
Just as an aside (and not as a jab or anything) - aren't you at university? That's a great time to make friends with people all over campus. People dog the "old boy network" and it does have a lot of potential for abuse, but it's also an extremely valuable thing - not just professionally, but on a personal level. Not a lecture or anything. Not even advice, really. Just a stating my own experience.
good luck,
k
