"As to relativity, I must confess that I would rather have a subject in which there would be a half dozen members of the Academy competent enough to understand at least a few words of what the speakers were saying if we had a symposium upon it. I pray to God that the progress of science will send relativity to some region of space beyond the fourth dimension, from whence it may never return to plague us."

--Letter of C.G. Abbot (Home Secretary of the National Academy of Science) to G.E. Hale (Director of Mount Wilson Observatory), 20 January 1920.

As it turned out, the subject chosen for that year's NAS Symposium was the famous Shapley-Curtis "Debate", which argued whether the Milky Way was the whole Universe, or just one of many island universes. The answer to THAT question,was eventually settled by Ed Hubble at Mt Wilson just a few years later.

There's a lot of this going around, and we should confess, we're probably all guilty of it to a certain extent. If Einstein is wrong, then FTL travel is possible! It's that simple, and an irresistable and highly seductive concept to all sci-fi fans, even those who should know better.

Einstein was no great mathematician, and he needed help with the General Theory of Relativity (Gravity, space-time continuum, etc). But the truth is that Special Theory, the laws that govern time dilation, Lorentz-Fitzgerald Contraction, twin paradox, E = mc^2 and all the other manifestations of space travel we find so restricting and disappointing, are mostly just high school algebra.

It isn't the math that made Special Relativity such an enormous intellectual achievement, it was the underlying assumptions (space, mass and time are all observed and variable quantities, the speed of light is the one that is always constant, all the time). Even though the evidence for this had been around for years, it was so counter-intuitive that no one could get past it before Einstein. It was an enormous intellectual achievement, and as you point out, has survived a century of determined assault in the laboratory and in the field.

Yeah, I'd give my left nut too if I thought there was some way around a max speed limit of 3x10^8 m/s.