Why Superluminal Signals Tangle Time express

Original: "Superluminal Transformations and Indeterminism"
· Amrapali Sen, Flavio Del Santo
arXiv:2601.15263 · 2026-01-21 · CC BY 4.0 · 1 min
Travel faster than light? The math has no objection, but then cause and effect swap places.

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According to the laws of physics, nothing can outrun light, otherwise for some observers the effect would occur before the cause. Artur Ekert and Andrzej Dragan showed that this situation creates an uncertainty resembling quantum indeterminacy. Now it's proven: to preserve the order of events, any system with superluminal leaps must have a boundless amount of information, or lose its memory and a single chain of causes.

The world turns out to be like a recipe where, to keep the steps in the right order, you need to know every ingredient with infinite precision — otherwise the dish is ruined. That means, at the deepest level, reality stores an immeasurable volume of data, and quantum randomness is only an illusion. This idea was anticipated by Hendrik Lorentz. The most astonishing part: almost all numbers that would be needed for such a description cannot be written as a finite formula: they contain an endless, unpredictable noise of digits. So spacetime keeps serving up surprises.

Almost all real numbers cannot be written as a finite formula: they store an infinite amount of unpredictable digits, like a hidden ocean of information.

Stories about faster-than-light travel, from Wells's Time Machine to Star Trek episodes, play with the same puzzle about the order of events.

Scientists
James Clerk MaxwellAlbert A. MichelsonHendrik LorentzHenri PoincaréNiels BohrPascual Jordan
Concepts
quantum temporal order CPT theorem quantum switch uncertainty principle time uncertainty invariant Lorentz transformations no-cloning theorem locality symmetry causality classical limit randomness photon indistinguishability Lorentz Invariance Violation information theory probability theory information loss gravitational singularity nonlinearity