When I read this kind of (serious!) physical therories I really find it rather difficult to isolate them from crackpot theories (some crackpot theories are even more imaginative than this one). The only way I found is to consider from what institute/person the article is.
To me this almost sounds like some crazy kinky joke. (Maybe I've just got a sick mind though.) I had to re-read it a couple of times until I remembered that latex is a way to lay-out formulae etc. :P
The best way is to learn the material yourself and then it becomes easy to separate real and crackpot theories. That said, that can take quite a lot of time, so reputation is indeed probably a good proxy.
Exactly. But that they said FTL is a violation of general relativity made be doubt the article. General relativity does not disallow FTL, special relativity does. But that is about my extends of knowledge about these things.
Also, while FTL is not allowed in general or special relativity, that's not why general relativity is incompatible with general relativity (since quantum mechanics depends on special relativity, which also doesn't allow FTL). The actual reason is more complicated and comes down to a certain mathematical trick (renormalisation) which is needed for quantum mechanics to not predict absurd probabilities failing to work when you try to construct it in general relativity.
I'm not sure why general and special relativity are called like that. Special relativity is about movement and how that causes length contractions, time dilations and a change of mass of the moving object. General relativity is about how mass (even at rest) dilates spacetime. So general relativity is about black holes and worm holes and how space itself maybe "moves". There is no speed limit on how fast a region of space itself can move in relation to another region, thus it is ok that the universe expands at a speed where two regions are "moving" away from each other faster than the speed of light.
So if you could move space itself you could implement FTL travel, because this is not movement at all in the sense of special relativity. Some scientists say one could do that if you could create matter with a negative energy density, whatever that might mean. I think our understanding of the universe does not exclude the possibility for such matter, but it doesn't predict it either. So unless new discoveries are made that lead to new theories that predict such matter FTL is in the realm of wishful thinking.
That's what I could piece together from various (non science journal) news publications and YouTube videos (by PhDs, aimed at laymen).
Under the assumption that panzi's statement is correct (I'm no physicist) in the limited context of special relativity FTL travel is impossible. But general relativity considers a more general context.
