General Relativity 100 - Nothing - No Way

It goes with out saying that, if the constants are not constant, we need no longer strain ourselves to interpret the redshift as due to a velocity of recession, or, for that matter, strive to interpret anything else on the cosmic scale.
Harlow Shapley, Galaxies, Third edition, p. 225

 If there is one thing that the Oracle of Ottawa remembers about high school is that nothing - no way can ever go faster than the speed of light. Because the General Theory of Relativity said so! We all were even blessed at Arnprior District High School with certain science and physics teachers that could work in the general theory to most any problem, with out blinking an eye! The one example that comes to mind is; we detonate one ton of trinitrotoluene , how much of the mass of the TNT was directly converted into energy? And of course after an impressive flurry of chalk and dust and something about E equals MC squared we were told that it was some small piddling number that an engineering type wouldn't give the time of day to.

Galaxy UDFy 38135539 (inside red circle)

All the Oracle of Ottawa can remember thinking of the demonstration is that thank God we do not have to reinvent the light bulb, electricity, radio and the internal combustion engine using the general theory! All these things just happen to work fine without the general theory and gratefully all were invented before the general theory came out in 1915. And even before 1915 the Curies were working their magic discovering radioactivity, every time I read that story I can just picture that glow in their lab. Weird, no general theory was required... I often thought a lot recently, would nuclear weapons have been developed without the general theory? Are you sure about that?

Stanislaw Ulam, the father of the Super, in his book Adventures of a Mathematician never mentioned the general theory once if I correctly remember. Sometimes in passing one can only conclude that the general theory was more a hindrance than a help in the last 100 years.

But as the tribute books to the 100th anniversary of the general theory are still sitting on the bookshelves unsold, the fine cracks in the theory are starting to appear. The most powerful of them is that certain galaxies are being measured by the Hubble Space telescope and the ESA VLT as having z values greater than 1.4, which would mean that the galaxy is receding at a speed greater than the speed of light! Not only are they receding at slightly faster than the speed of light, they are receding at an impossible speed with z values greater than 8.0! And this value is being attached to more than just one recently observed galaxy.

The only reason that the Oracle of Ottawa is going on about this is that it is the first tell into how we can break the light barrier. We will do it the same way that space-time is expanding between far off galaxies. There is a possible very simple explanation for this. In closing the Oracle of Ottawa must mention the very weird coincidence of the Hubble z value of 1.4 for an object receding greater than the speed of light and that the Chandrasekhar limit of 1.4 solar masses that determines whether a collapsing star will be a white dwarf if under 1.4 solar masses, and a 'black hole' if over 1.4 solar masses. Very strange that...