In history of Science there was one who really said that the speed of light could be passed and he had opposed and could continue to oppose Einstein: it was Tesla but he died soon after. Tesla was one of the greatest genious of his time. In fact it was him and not Marconi whould should receive the Nobel Prize: http://www.ccrane.com/news/whatsinthenews.03.19.03.htm "For all his accomplishments, however, Tesla was most affected by the slap in the face he felt when Marconi received the Nobel Prize in 1909. Marconi shared the prize with German scientist Karl Ferdinand Braun, "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy." I should mention that one of the most famous quotations attributed to Tesla about Marconi is the following: "Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents." Of course, Tesla spoke these words before Marconi was awarded the Nobel Prize. In a turn of bitter irony, Tesla died before he was awarded the patent initially awarded to Marconi. According to the fantastic PBS piece on Tesla (http://www.pbs.org/tesla/index.html), the Supreme Court had awarded the patent to Tesla merely to avoid having to pay any royalties to the Marconi Corporation, which was suing the US government for patents used during World War I." This is a paper on Tesla about the speed of light : <a href="http://www.econometric-wave.com/tesla_speed_of_light.gif" target="_blank"><img src=http://www.econometric-wave.com/tesla_speed_of_light_thumb.gif>scan of tesla's paper (can't upload on ET too big: 640k so click to zoom)</a>
Harry, I think there are tons of people (scientists included) who have searched for superluminal speeds. Relativity has been attacked from all sides since the day it was born. The model is very useful. It has shown itself to be the model of choice for high speed motion. If in the future, someone does discover superluminal speeds, that won't change SR's applicability in its current regime. We still use Newton's mechanics even though we know they are 'wrong', in the sense that they only work in a certain regime. We are just careful to keep them in their domain of applicability.
Searching ... everybody can search, for example searching for God without ever finding it So it is finding that is more interesting and not only in abstraction but above in realisation. As far as I remember Tesla claimed to have found the way to pass the speed of light and I think he has even deposited a patent on that (remember he is not only a theorician but above a great inventor with many patents that has changed the world notably general electric wouldn't be without him). So Tesla is not any Scientist - for most of them never discover anything - he has been one of the greatest genious in Science (for me the top genious in Science were perhaps Poincarré, Tesla and Einstein). Should be somewhere in my archives.