While living in his dorm at the University of Cardiff, Wales, Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre—then pursuing a Ph.D. in numerical relativity—wrote a short paper detailing the physical reality of the warp drive. Alcubierre often spent Friday nights with friends watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, and one night, he pondered how exactly such an engine could work. Eventually published in 1994, the young physicist couldn’t have known that the resulting paper would inspire decades of research into the real-world applications of warp drives.
Now, a new study led by Harold “Sonny” White—former NASA scientist and leader of the experimental Eagleworks laboratory at Johnson Space Center—presents the latest chapter based on Alcubierre’s original work. Instead of relying on Alcubierre’s spherical warp bubble metric, White and his colleagues at Casimir Space developed a new kind of warp topology that limits the physical limitations of warp-drive physics. The results of the study were published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.
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