Hackers of physics do not beat Nature; they only fool people
Shaun Maguire, a PhD student who blogs together with John Preskill, spent his childhood hacking computers. It is natural for him to do the same thing to Nature:
Hacking nature: loopholes in the laws of physics
A source of the (especially young) people's excitement about physics is their desire to beat the old laws of Nature and to hack into systems around us. To get unlimited moves in the
Candy Crush Saga. To make a compromise with a vendor machine: to acquire the chocolate while paying no money. To be able to subscribe to an ObamaCare website. To surpass the speed of light and to beat the uncertainty principle.
Warp drive cannot work, as I will mention again.
It's a part of the human nature to think that the previous limitations can be circumvented. Our ancestors couldn't get to the Moon; we can. So some people think that if our ancestors couldn't surpass the speed of light, then yes, we can. Or at least, our descendants will be able to. In technology, the slogan "yes, we can" captures a large part of the major advances. But the progress in physics doesn't really uniformly march in this "yes, we can" direction.
Quite on the contrary: most of the progress in modern fundamental physics may be summarized by the slogan "no, you really cannot". You cannot do things that were once thought to be possible. You cannot surpass the speed of light, special relativity tells us, even though Newton thought it was perfectly OK. You cannot concentrate some mass (or entropy) to a smaller volume than the corresponding Schwarzschild radius, general relativity claims, although it was thought to be possible before Einstein.
You cannot measure the position and the velocity more accurately than \(\Delta x\cdot \Delta p=\hbar /2 \) although classical physicists would think that you could. You cannot observe things without affecting them, Heisenberg realized. You cannot perform a mathematical operation without producing some amount of entropy, statistical mechanics implies. You cannot probe geometry at the sub-Planckian distances, quantum gravity teaches us. And so on, and so on. You cannot do many things that used to seem doable.
Most of the progress is going in the opposite direction than the practical "yes, we can" problem solvers seem to assume. Every major revolution in physics is actually connected with some new bans and in most contexts, Nature boasts waterproof law enforcement mechanisms. And because progress in science is really about the falsification of previous theories or ideas, theories that would claim "yes, we can", and because the falsification is irreversible, the finding that "no, you really cannot" do certain fundamental things is here with us to stay.