> but did not run into the "fundamental" laws of physics

Those "fundamental" laws of physics didn't exist several centuries ago.

Yes they did, we just hadn't figured them out yet. If we were very wrong in them, we'd have to be wrong in a way that doesn't affect all the technology using the wrong theory - which is part of why we refined them, because shit didn't work.

That's what it means to be contradicting fundamental physics. It implies all of our other knowledge is wrong, but we are just lucky enough that our machines work anyway. Which, unless we see a phenomenon that we can't fit into our existing theories, seems unlikely

Let's invent new laws of physics and hope the universe adopts them.

> FTL travel breaks physics

Like quantum mechanics broke physics?

Quantum mechanics _fixed_ physics. Newtonian physics predicts that an electron will spiral into the nucleus of an atom within a few nanoseconds of the atom’s creation.

We observed quantum effects before the theory. We haven't seen any phenomena so far which require physics that could lead to FTL