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In essence, Dragan had shown that in a world ruled by special relativity, counterintuitive quantum effects don't have to be accepted as fundamental. In other words, by including the wacky 'unphysical' parts of special relativity's equations, patently random and distinctly quantum-like phenomena emerge naturally.

A few months later, realising the enormity of what he had discovered, Dragan got these thoughts and calculations down on paper and submitted the work to a scientific journal. But the manuscript was rejected, twice. "I got completely disappointed by this," he says. "I just thought, 'I'm not gonna bother anymore, I'm going to leave it behind'."

Dragan moved on from his disappointment and was happily working in a branch of quantum computing called relativistic quantum information. Then, in 2010, he received an email from Artur Ekert that would bring him right back to his musings on relativity and quantum mechanics. Ekert was and is a leading figure in quantum information and pioneer of quantum cryptography, who has dual Polish-British nationality and holds dual professorships at the University of Oxford and National University of Singapore. The email invited Dragan to Singapore to discuss links between their respective research.

Immediately realising an intellectual affinity, over the course of several visits Ekert and Dragan developed a friendship, becoming as comfortable talking about quantum algorithms as they were teasing each other with mathematical puzzles.

When Dragan finally shared his ideas on how quantum randomness might emerge from special relativity, Ekert was keen to get involved. "I thought it was beautiful," he says. Up to then, Dragan had only explored his ideas in a toy world with one space dimension and time. Ekert encouraged and assisted Dragan to go further, and see if it still worked in the real world of four-dimensional spacetime.

"Like two jazz players meeting every now and then and having a gig together," Ekert says of the pair's meetings in Singapore. Over the summer of 2019, Dragan and Ekert wrote up a paper summarising their new theory.

With memories of rejection swirling around his mind, before submitting it to New Journal of Physics, Dragan gave Ekert one final opportunity to back out before publishing their results: "Are you not afraid to endanger your reputation?" asked Dragan. Ekert was blunt in his response: "Screw reputation."

Unlike Dragan's previous solo attempts, the paper passed through its first test with the journal's academic reviewers unscathed. And though it went viral upon publication in 2020 and has amassed over 30,000 downloads and counting - by far the most out of all the papers published last year in the journal - the duo had (and still have) a fight on their hands to be taken seriously by the court of scientific opinion.

One physicist who was immediately attracted to Dragan and Ekert's ideas is quantum information scientist Vlatko Vedral. After reading the article, Vedral -- whose unofficial PhD mentor was Ekert in the past -- invited Dragan to present a virtual talk to his group at the University of Oxford. "It generated a lot of excitement," he says. "What I like about the approach is that frequently we think about imposing quantum mechanics on everything else; how do we make relativity comply with quantum mechanics? But they are trying to twist this around."

Yet for every Vedral open to hearing out unorthodox ideas, there are many others who are suspicious of any approach that doesn't place quantum physics front and centre. Not only are crackpots with wild unphysical concepts rife in this area of physics, but deeply rooted in the community is the idea that the mind-bending elements in quantum physics simply cannot be explained any further. They just are.

Critics from this camp question both the assumptions and methods used by the Polish pair to come to their conclusions. For instance, when Dragan discussed these ideas with one of the founding fathers of string theory, Holger Nielsen, the Danish physicist's main criticism was that faster-than-light matter would be unstable and therefore unphysical. Another theoretical physicist, who asked to remain anonymous, thought that the pair had used mathematics that changes the vantage point from which you observe the physics in order to change the actual underlying physics itself, which it should never do.

Often though, these criticisms boil down to two points: that no one has ever detected anything racing beyond light speed, and that if anything did travel that fast, time travel is possible. Time travel leads to what is known as causal paradoxes. The most famous of these is the grandfather paradox -- the idea that if you travel back in time and kill your grandfather, your own birth will be impossible.

Dragan and Ekert argue that these critics miss the point. "We're not saying there are any objects that travel faster than light; there might be, but that doesn't enter our arguments," Ekert says. "What we are saying is that you can look on the world from a perspective that is beyond light speed."

From this faster-than-light vantage point, you can swap the order of cause and effect. This is a key result because the underlying physics must remain the same regardless of whether you're watching events unfold above or below the cosmic speed limit. And if this is true, the pair argue that the order of events no longer plays a fundamental role in the theory.

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