Why try to get an object to travel beyond c (the speed of light)? Another way to move faster than light is slowing down light or even stopping it.

Photons are massless, and that's why they can travel as fast as they do. So we need to weigh photons down in order to slow them down.

The technique to accomplish this requires warm rubidium vapours, a glass cell and two lasers, a "control laser" and a "signal laser". The signal laser is the one to be stopped. Using the control laser, we can cause rubidium gas in a glass cell to become "dispersive" -- in other words, the velocity of light passing through the gas depends sensitively on the colour of the light. In such a dispersive gas, atoms and photons interact strongly. Effectively dragged down by strong interactions with atoms, the photons will slow to a "crawl". An atom-photon system like this is called a "polariton".

Next we reduce the intensity of the signal laser until the polariton is 100% atomic. There will be no photons left inside the chamber. Yet the imprint of the photons will remain -- on the atoms themselves. Information describing the fading laser pulse will be stored, like a code, in the up-and-down patterns of the atoms' spin axes, from where it can be released afterwards by another laser beam directed through the chamber.

Does this sound like science fiction to you? It's only quantum physics. Scientist at Harvard University managed to slow down light by sending it through atomic vapours (extremely cold sodium gas can be used as well as warm rubidium) in 1999 and to stop it completely about two years later. So all you need to travel faster than light is a bicycle and a Harvard quantum physics lab to drive by.