Is Warp-Travel No Longer Just Science-Fiction?

By Sneha Mahadevan, 8th Grade

Sure, to make all the Trekkies out there go crazy jumping for joy, a couple of researchers at Applied Physics have created the first general model for a warp drive. For those who don't know, warp-capability is the ability of a ship to travel at faster-than-light speeds. Originally used fictitiously in the '60s in "Star Trek", the idea of warp drive was scorned by scientists for years, as it defied Einstein's theory of general relativity explaining how objects cannot accelerate to or above the speed of light (the reason being that this would require an infinite amount of energy).

However, the idea of a warp drive implies warping time and space to create a shortcut through them; in other words, a warp-capable ship could travel the same distance as light within the same amount of time, but without actually moving at light-speed. Think of it like this: You have a piece of paper. If you want to travel across its entire surface, it would take a certain amount of time to do so. But what if you folded the paper in half and moved through it? You would reach your destination in but a fraction of the time it would have taken you otherwise. This is the logic that Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire used when creating their model for a warp drive, which they believe is actually possible to construct at some point in the future. They published their findings in a paper in the Institute of Physics' journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.

Bobrick and Martire began their research with a warp drive concept developed by Miguel Alcubierre in 1994. The Alcubierre Drive would - theoretically - contract space-time in front of it and expand space-time behind it. The issue with this design is that it would require a substantial amount of negative energy, which is just not achievable in a real spacecraft. Bobrick and Martire's idea, on the other hand, proposes using an immense gravitational force to bend space-time. Their idea is possible to create, though it requires a roughly planet-sized mass to be compressed into a spacecraft in order to utilize the mass's gravity. For this reason, a prototype could not currently be built, although it may and likely will be sometime in the future.

On a final note, these new findings, however groundbreaking they may be, should be taken with a grain of salt, as the idea is fairly new and so far untested.