University of Chicago alumna and renowned author/critic Susan Sontag said, “The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.” We all have heard serious questions, absurd questions, and seriously absurd questions, some of which cannot be answered without obliterating the very question. Destroy a question with your answer.

In physics, the term quantum entanglement refers to the observation that two particles can “link” together, and that any change to one—say, its spin—instantly occurs in the other, no matter the distance between the two. The problem comes that information, such as how a particle is spinning, can only travel as fast as light, which is not instantaneous. So how do these particles send information to each other faster than the speed limit for information? Well the answer is that there is no speed limit to information because there is no speed of light. 

The speed of light can only be measured two ways, and there is no experiment that can determine the one-way speed of light. This means that light may not travel at one constant speed; instead, it may travel twice as fast in one direction and two-thirds as fast in the other, or instantly in one direction and much slower in the opposite direction. 

And there is no reason to believe that this cannot change, that it is impossible that one day light is instant in one direction and the next it is the same speed in both directions. So there is not one speed of light, but a spectrum of speeds of light, and that means that the speed limit of the universe is not the two-way speed of light, it is the fastest one-way speed of light. So then the speed limit of the universe may be instantaneous speed, if light can travel instantaneously, right? But this conclusion is still limited by forcing our linear ideals of time into speed. 

Time may be linear, but it is equally likely to loop and repeat, or occur all at once simultaneously, or spiral away into a single point, or stretch and compress a thousand different ways. There is no particular reason to believe that time must be linear, besides our own observations. These observations are from an instrument meant to comprehend small things—the plants we can eat nearby and the deadly mushrooms to avoid—not massive concepts of space and time warping through gravity in ways beyond our understanding. It is like asking a 2-D being to ask how many dimensions there are: it will say two, because that is all their bodily instruments can comprehend, not because they are right. 

So, time may bend in a million different ways, and this changes what it means to be instant. For the case of information traveling, instantaneous travel means that in the smallest possible scale of time, information can travel any distance. But that smallest scale of time may be larger or smaller, depending on how time is stretched or compressed, and so something instantaneous in one case may be slower, while still instantaneous, than another case. 

If true, then there is no one speed limit of information or the universe, there are a million, a billion, a quadrillion speed limits of light, as time bends and shifts and warps from one instance to another. It is like asking exactly how many colors there are; you can only derive an answer if you place artificial restrictions on what separates one color from another. So that is how quantum entanglement can break the speed limit of the universe, because there is no one true speed limit of information. As time and light change and bend from moment to moment and change what speed is possible, and what it means to travel at that speed.