The concept of a warp drive has become a cultural icon ever since Star Trek's Captain Kirk said, "Warp Drive, Mr. Scott," to initiate faster-than-light travel for the Starship Enterprise.
Einstein had figured out that the top speed in the entire universe is the speed of light. That calculates to 670,616,629 miles per hour (mph), which is about 186,282 miles per second.
Miguel Alcubierre first proposed what we’ve called the Alcubierre drive in 1994, which he worked out using Einstein’s theory of general relativity, but needed absurd amounts of energy and unattainable negative energy.
This brings us to the new study, which scientists in the Advanced Propulsion Laboratory (APL) at Applied Physics just published in the peer-reviewed journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. In the report, the APL team unveils the world’s first model for a physical warp drive—one that doesn’t require negative energy.
The study is understandably pretty thick (read the whole thing here), but here’s the gist of the model: Where the existing paradigm uses negative energy—exotic matter that doesn’t exist and can’t be generated within our current understanding of the universe—this new concept uses floating bubbles of spacetime rather than floating ships in spacetime.
Of course, there’s one gigantic caveat here: The concept in this paper is still in the “far future” zone of possibility, made of ideas that scientists still don’t know how to construct in any sense.
The idea that a warp drive is even remotely possible is fantastic.
Open thread, you Trekkies!
