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What lies beyond the year 2000? Science Fiction
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According to relativity, nothing in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light. If it does, it will travel back in time. A particle that would travel faster than the speed of light is called a tachyon. Most science fiction shows have ships which have the ability to travel faster than the speed of light, if they didn't the show could get boring as 99% of the show would be travelling places. So, as we understand physics, it is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light. But there is nothing in there that says that we cannot bend this rule and end up travelling faster than light. There are quite a few possibilities, but below we have included a few and some of the technologies used on science fiction shows.
In Star Trek, to travel faster than the speed of light, they enter what is called Sub Space. On Star Trek, this means a layer of space for which the normal laws of the universe don't all apply. So you can travel faster than the speed of light. In real life, however, sub space is if we exit the 3rd dimension, and enter the 2nd dimension, the 2nd dimension is sub space. There is also nothing to say we cannot get somewhere instantly. In an experiment done at the University of California, a physicist named Raymond Chiao was able to have two photons race each other. One would take the direct path to the finish line, but the other would pass through, a barrier. This causes a phenonoma known as tunnelling. When a particle hits a barrier it cannot get around or go through, it just instantly disappears and reappears on the other side. Tunnelling is not just a theory, we know it works as it happens all the time with electrons in some types of electronic components. The particle did instantly get to the other side of the barrier, hence travelling faster than the speed of light.
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A method that would not violate relativity, yet
it would get you somewhere faster than the speed of light would, would be to 'warp'
space. This means that you 'collapse' the space in front of you and then it will
expand behind you. Theoretically this should get you instantly to the nearby
star. The only problems with this theory is that you have to send some sort of a
signal to where you want to collapse space, which means that the fastest we can get that
signal to go is at the speed of light and that the amount of energy required would be more
than all the energy in the universe.