Yes, maybe, but superluminal communication could come from any number of places if that's true. Quantum entanglement has some very strong results, both experimental and mathematical that appear to exclude it from the running.
Like, I'd be more happy with wormholes or tachyons or "actually the universe is a simulation" as possible fictional sources of superluminal communication than entanglement, just because we really do know how entanglement behaves quite well by now and it's no good for FTL communication.
Special relativity is a fact. It is literally how the universe works. I don't know what else to say. There's no debate, it's a certainty that you cannot transmit information faster than light. Space and Time in Special Relativity is 240 pages, and you only really need to read like half of them.
Maybe gravity doesn't exist on the sun. Maybe electrons attract in the Sahara desert. This is what you're suggesting.
Authors are making a common mistake, and you're justifying it. The point of science fiction (at least hard scifi[0][1]) is to predict the future given some assumptions or premise like "we can control individual neurons"[2] or "there's life on a neutron star"[3] or "the moon exploded"[4] or "message from outer space"[5]. You get some outlandish sounding ideas that readers can consider seriously because the author genuinely thought them through. Ideas that don't respect relativity are useless. It's like writing fiction about Napoleon with walkie-talkies. It doesn't make sense, you could (probably) do much better than Napoleonic tactics with a walkie-talkie. A military tactic in space that relies on instant communication is a useless idea. Plus I just plain think it would've made a better story if they had to strategize around the speed of light.
(spoiler) to be fair, The Three Body Problem almost did it right, their ships travel at non-relativistic speeds, and the first 3 messages take 5 years to transmit. But I didn't bother reading past the first book after the quantum entanglement mistake on the last few pages.
Maybe I'm getting elitist. The hard/soft scifi thing is an old conversation. I understand that the social commentary is a big aspect of some books, just don't call them science fiction.
>Special relativity is a fact. It is literally how the universe works.
not exactly. SR is true only in the fixed Euclidean metric space. It is applicable to our Universe only as far as our Universe can be approximated by such a metric space. Which is really a very good approximation - almost like a "fact" - at relatively small (yet not extremely small) scales and at small mass/energy densities.
>There's no debate, it's a certainty that you cannot transmit information faster than light.
in the domain of applicability of SR. Ie. until, say, you do something severe to that metric space. Which author actually did, in some way, by folding/unfolding additional dimensions.
>Plus I just plain think it would've made a better story if they had to strategize around the speed of light.
reminded how USSR armed forces seriously strategized around cavalry attacks on the Eve of WWII, ie. the war which opened for USSR by lightning speed attack by German tanks and airforce.
The math behind GR and QM contradict each other. We have a large amount of empirical evidence for a speed limit for information travel, yes, but since we don't even know how the universe works (ie a mathematically consistent model, with few parameters, supported by experimental evidence), I don't think you can say "it's how the universe works". We might eventually find out that the information speed limit only holds at low energy scales for example.
Would you be happier with handwaved wormholes? I think you get the same effect but without so obviously violating the rules. (the practical requirements to build a wormhole and the difficulty in keeping it open aside, wormholes aren't completely excluded by general relativity, yeah?)
